Air duct cleaning in Remington.

Across ZIP 22734, about three owner homes in four heat with electricity, and utility gas reaches roughly one in a hundred. Around here electric heat usually means a heat pump, and a heat pump pushes its air through the same ducts in January as in July. The NOAA normals station about ten miles north-northeast of town counts roughly 4,700 heating degree days and 1,000 cooling degree days a year, so a Remington blower runs through most of the calendar.

The old town grid is a different job. Fauquier County’s plan counts 75 buildings in town that merit the historic registers, many of them Victorian, Queen Anne and I-plan houses, and about 590 homes in the ZIP were built before 1960. Those houses were built long before central air, so whatever ductwork they have went in later, squeezed through closets, chases and crawl spaces wherever it fit. Retrofit runs bend tightly, and dust piles up at the bends.

Then there’s the ground. The County’s plan says the soils here settled out of a shallow lake long ago and hold water, which it says adds to the town’s flooding when the Rappahannock and Tinpot Run rise. A crawl space over ground like that stays damp, so sheet metal rusts at its seams and flexible duct sags where the straps give. When the river crested at 23.1 feet in June 2018, the flood report noted water in a couple of homes. Ductwork that sat in floodwater holds silt after it drains, and we’ll tell you plainly when a section should be replaced instead of cleaned.

About one owner home in eleven here heats mainly with wood. A stove or insert can drop fine ash into the room each time it’s loaded, and the nearest return grille pulls some of it into the system. Rentals are common too: more than four households in ten rent, and the typical rented home went up in 1957. When the rooms are empty at turnover, a landlord gets the same camera photos and the same written price.