About half the homeowners inside the Town of Purcellville heat with electricity, usually a heat pump, and a heat pump pushes air through the ductwork in every month that needs heating or cooling. There’s no long spring or fall pause with the blower sitting idle, so whatever gathers in the returns gathers on a year-round schedule. In a house heated by a propane furnace, the furnace and the air conditioner share one blower and one set of ducts the same way.
The town’s median owner home went up in 2001, and about half of all its homes were built after 2000, so the usual system is the one the builder left: flexible runs through the attic or the basement ceiling, a trunk off the air handler, and one large return in a hallway. Twenty-five years of filter changes, a few of them late, shows at that return first. About one home in five in town is a townhouse, where the air handler often sits in a closet or the attic with short runs to each room.
The old houses around the downtown grid predate central air. About seven homes in a hundred in town were built before 1940, and in houses like those the ductwork came decades later and went wherever it could fit, up through closets and into attic spaces. The camera photos are how we learn what’s actually there before we quote, and some of those houses cool with ductless heads and have little ductwork worth cleaning.
Outside the town limits, on the county side of 20132, nearly every home is a detached house and plenty are big ones on a few acres, so a second system, one for the main floor and one up top, is common, and each is its own cleaning. Close to three in ten of those homes went up before 1980, and in an old farmhouse the cooling may run on its own attic air handler, separate from the furnace downstairs. The dryer vent cleaning can ride along on the same visit for $199.