Clifton houses run big. About 62 percent of the homes in 20124 have at least nine rooms, against 28 percent countywide, and a house that size is often cooled by two systems, one for the main floor and basement and one for the bedrooms. That second air handler often sits in the attic, where nobody walks past it. Each system is its own tune-up at $99, with its own written findings.
Up there the coil sweats all summer into a pan, and the water leaves through a drain line laid across the attic floor. Dust and the slime that grows in standing water narrow that line a little every season, and when it backs up, the bedroom ceiling is next. Clearing the drain line is part of every tune-up, and on an attic unit it’s the part that pays for the visit.
Around the town and out on the big lots along Clifton, Compton and Yates Ford Roads, about half the owner homes heat with electricity, which out here usually means a heat pump. That outdoor unit heats all winter, defrosting itself on frosty mornings, then goes straight to cooling. Book it in the mild weeks between the last cold night and the first hot one.
Around Springstone Drive it’s another picture. About nine in ten of those homes went up in the 1980s, and about 85 percent of the owners heat with natural gas, so the cooling is a condenser out back piped to a coil above the furnace in the basement. Most of those houses are on their second or third condenser by now, and the coil indoors is sometimes older than the one outside.