In the Town of Haymarket most homes went up in the 1980s and 90s, and the median owner home is from 1995. Ductwork from those years is usually a sheet-metal trunk off the air handler with flexible branches to the rooms, and a single large return grille per floor pulling air back. That big grille is where the dust gathers first, and since about a third of the town’s homes are townhouses, the air handler behind it is often in a closet or the attic.
Dominion Valley and Piedmont are the 2000s: across 20169 the median owner home was built in 2006, and about three in four homes are single-family houses. A larger house from that decade often runs two air handlers, one serving the main floors and a second in the attic serving the bedrooms. The attic unit is reached through a ceiling hatch, so it tends to go years without anyone opening it. We clean and price each system separately, and the second is billed for less than the first.
Bull Run Mountain Estates is the older end: a median house from 1978, with oil heat in about four in ten. An oil burner that lights late can puff soot back through the furnace and out into the supply ducts, and it shows as dark streaks around the registers. If that’s what you see, the burner needs an oil heat company’s attention before the ducts do, or a cleaning just gets dirty again.
None of this needs a sign-off. Inside the Town, where the whole town is a historic district, the design guidelines exempt interior work from Architectural Review Board review, and duct cleaning needs no County permit in the town or out of it. If you’d like the dryer line done too, it rides along on the same appointment for $199, and in the town’s townhouses that line tends to run a long way between floors.