Air duct cleaning in Aldie.

Across all of 20105 more than nine in ten homes went up after 2000, which makes duct cleaning here a younger question than in most of Northern Virginia. A Stone Ridge house from around the 2009 median has moved air through the same ductwork for about seventeen years; one from around the ZIP’s 2013 median, about a dozen. Those can be very different insides, and photos tell us which one you have. With gas heat in close to eight in ten owner homes, most of these are a gas furnace and an air conditioner sharing one blower and one set of ducts, so whatever is in there rides along in both seasons.

About three in ten homes in 20105 are townhouses, more than half of them in Stone Ridge, and a three-level one sometimes has two air handlers: a lower one for the living floors and an upper one, up under the roof, feeding the bedrooms. We price and clean them separately. The upper one is the one nobody has looked at, because reaching it means a ladder and a hatch in a closet ceiling, so mention the hatch when you book.

Most of 20105 is houses, not apartments: about six in ten homes are single-family and only about one in ten is rented. The condos are a smaller slice. Stone Ridge’s condo communities, from Amber Springs and Centre Park to Stone Springs and Summerwalk, each have a management company, and Kirkpatrick Farms has condos of its own, so ask whether anything shared runs through the building before you book. A condo system is small and quick, and if you rent the unit out, the gap between tenants is the simplest time to do it.

The old village along Route 50 is the exception to all of it: an early nineteenth-century settlement around Aldie Mill, where any ductwork came long after the houses were built. Reaching it is most of that job, so the camera photos come before any number. Back in the townhouse streets, the dryer vent cleaning can ride on the same visit for $199, and with the laundry upstairs that line is often the longer of the two jobs.