Ashburn’s duct systems come from two eras. In Ashburn proper, around Ashburn Farm and Ashburn Village, roughly half the homes date from 1980 through 1999, and a house that age usually has sheet-metal trunks with a large return grille or two drawing from each floor. Brambleton’s median home is from 2011 and Moorefield’s and One Loudoun’s from 2015, and there the runs off the trunk are mostly flexible duct, often in an attic, where they get crushed or pulled loose as easily as they get dusty.
About four in ten Ashburn homes are townhouses, and in Loudoun Valley Estates, Moorefield and Goose Creek Village they’re the majority. A three-level townhouse often has the air handler up in the attic or tucked into a top-floor closet, so the ground floor’s registers sit at the far end of the longest runs, and the camera goes down to those, not only to the registers beside the unit.
Rentals cluster in a few corners: about seven in ten homes in University Center are rented, about half in Goose Creek Village and almost two in five in Moorefield. For a landlord, the gap between one lease and the next is when the rooms are empty and a cleaning is simplest, and the photos and our receipt record what the ducts looked like when the next tenant moved in.
Broadlands and Belmont lean single-family, with close to six in ten homes in each a detached house, and a big detached house often has a second system for the top floor or the basement. We photograph and quote the two separately, and a system that’s clean on camera stays off the bill.