Nobody planned a laundry room into Upperville’s oldest houses. The state’s register describes stone, brick and wood frame, a few with log rooms at the core, many stuccoed over, and a wall like that can run well past a foot thick. A dryer vent line has to cross it in a sleeve, or it finds a softer way out: through a frame rear addition, under a porch, or up out of a cellar. Two early brick houses on the highway stand on raised basements, where a dryer pushes its lint up and out through the foundation.
Then there’s the hail. NOAA’s storm database records golf-ball hail near Upperville in August 2011 and again in August 2021, the second time with 60-knot gusts that brought trees and power lines down off Route 50 near Trappe Road. Stones that size crack a plastic louvered hood, and a broken flap either hangs open for birds and wasps or jams shut and traps the lint. After a hailstorm, look at the hood from the yard; a cracked one gets priced before we clean.
Snow buries the low ones. The NOAA gauge near The Plains averages close to 20 inches a winter, and in the January 2016 blizzard a trained spotter in Middleburg measured 34 inches and an NWS employee at Bluemont 36. A hood a foot above grade on a one-story house goes under a drift that deep, and the dryer’s hot, wet air has nowhere to go. Clear it before the first load after a storm.
Plenty of houses here have propane, and some run a propane dryer, which sends burner exhaust down the same line as the lint. Fauquier County Fire Rescue takes requests for smoke and carbon monoxide alarms through a form on its Public Education page, and one outside the laundry room is worth having. On the Loudoun side of 20184, the fire and rescue advice below applies.