NOAA’s 1991 to 2020 normals for Dulles Airport, beside Sterling, still count close to four nights at or below freezing in April, where Reagan National averages about one every other year. Across a whole year Dulles logs nearly four times as many heating degree days as cooling ones. Electric heat, here usually a heat pump, warms close to eight in ten Countryside owner homes and just over half of those around Sterling Park, so those outdoor units reach their spring visit having just finished the heavier half of their year.
Around Sterling Park and in Sugarland Run about four in ten homes predate 1980, and the typical owner’s house in the part the Census calls Sterling went up in 1979. A house that age has seen several outdoor units come and go. Indoors the air handler or furnace usually sits on the lowest level, and where that level got finished, the coil’s water often leaves by a little condensate pump that lifts it to a drain. Nobody remembers that pump until the carpet beside it is wet.
In Cascades and Lowes Island the fuel flips: about eight in ten Cascades owners and seven in ten in Lowes Island heat with gas, so the air conditioner out back got the winter off, its cooling coil sitting in the ductwork right above the furnace. Their typical house dates from 1996, so most are on a second air conditioner by now. Some bigger Lowes Island houses add a second system for the bedrooms, which is a second $99 visit.
Oak Grove is mostly townhouses with a 2005 median, so a builder’s condenser still running there has about twenty summers behind it, and the written findings say whether it’s worth another. Arcola’s median home is from 2017, so there the visit is mostly cleaning and a baseline. Around Dulles Town Center more than half the homes are in condo and apartment buildings and seven in ten are rented, so the unit’s owner, not always whoever lives there, usually books.