Air duct cleaning in Bealeton.

Bealeton is young for a place with a railroad depot in its past. The Census puts the median owner home at 1996: about three homes in ten went up in the 1980s, about half since 2000, and only about fifteen in the four decades before 1980. About seven owners in ten heat with electricity, and in houses of this age that’s mostly heat pumps. A heat pump’s air handler runs the same ducts for cooling in summer and heating in winter, so they get very few weeks off.

Fauquier County’s plan for Bealeton explains the timing. Building waited on public sewer, because soil studies in the 1970s showed the ground here wouldn’t take septic drainfields. Once public water and a force main sewer came from Remington, the 1990s filled in mostly half-acre lots, and Meadowbrook, Foxmeade and Edgewood East now line Route 28 west of Route 17. Most of those houses are on their second heat pump or near it, and the new equipment usually went onto the original trunk and branch runs without anyone looking inside them.

Between 2000 and 2010 the County counts Bealeton growing from about 900 homes to about 1,650, most of it along Station Drive and on the west end. Those houses are near twenty years on their first ductwork. Flexible runs sag where they cross an attic or a crawl space, and dust settles in every low spot, so the camera goes into the long flexible runs first.

About one owner in seven heats with propane, usually a furnace with an air conditioner beside it; the job doesn’t change. About one home in five is in a building of ten units or more, owned condos and rentals both, and in a rental the landlord usually books it.