Across 20105 the median owner home went up in 2013, so an air conditioner that came with a house that age has a dozen or so summers behind it: past the new-house years, usually nowhere near worn out. On a system like that the spring visit is mostly about the parts that collect dirt, not the parts that wear: the indoor coil, the blower and the condensate drain.
Stone Ridge is the older end of it. Its median owner home dates to 2009, so plenty of its original condensers are in their late teens. There the write-up says how the capacitor, the contactor and the fan motor are holding up, so a replacement gets planned for a mild month instead of forced on you in a hot one.
Close to a third of Aldie’s homes are townhouses, more than half in Stone Ridge. In a three-story one the bedrooms may run off an attic air handler, a second system with its own thermostat and its own $99 visit. Up there it works through the summer in attic heat, and its condensate drains through a pan fitted with a float switch: if the line slows, the switch cuts the upstairs cooling before the ceiling below gets wet. That line is what the visit clears, and a unit you only ever see through a hatch is an easy one to forget.
Outside Stone Ridge, Aldie has more single-family houses, and more of them heat with electricity or propane. Electric heat in a house this new is typically a heat pump, whose outdoor unit has worked all winter by the time its spring visit comes. In the condos, at Kirkpatrick Farms or in Stone Ridge’s Amber Springs to Summerwalk, the association documents say whether the closet air handler is yours to book.