A McLean tune-up starts with a walk around the house. The median 22101 home has nine rooms or more, against 6.4 across Fairfax County, and that much house usually takes more than one air conditioner: a basement system for the main floors, an attic one for the bedrooms, sometimes a third. Each outdoor unit with its own indoor coil and blower is a system, and each system is its own tune-up at $99.
In a house heated by a hot-water boiler, the cooling has nothing to share. With no furnace blower in the basement, central air came with an air handler of its own, usually in the attic, blowing down through ceiling registers. Its coil drips into a pan over finished plaster every hour it runs, and the drain line we clear is what keeps that water off the bedroom ceilings. Tell us where the hatch or the pull-down stairs are when you book.
About 15 percent of 22101’s homes went up in 2010 or later, some where an older house came down. A new house that size often runs one big system split into zones: one outdoor unit, one air handler, and motorized dampers answering to a thermostat on each floor. That’s one system and one tune-up, however many thermostats are on the walls. If one floor runs warm while the rest are fine, say so when you book; a damper stuck shut acts a lot like a weak air conditioner.
22102 is a different McLean. Close to half its homes are in buildings of 50 units or more, and more than four in ten owner homes heat with electricity, which in a tower usually means a hall closet heat pump that heated the unit all winter before it starts cooling again. Owner homes there date from a median of 1981 and rented ones from 2001, so the older condo buildings are usually on a second or third closet unit, while the newest rental towers are often still on their first. Give us the building and the unit number when you book.