Dryer vent cleaning in Aldie.

More than half the homes in Stone Ridge are townhouses, about three in ten across all of 20105, and the neighborhood’s median owner home dates to 2009. In a townhouse from those years the laundry is often up on the bedroom floor, so the dryer vent travels through the house before it gets outside, often ending on the roof. Every elbow on the way is somewhere for lint to settle.

A Stone Ridge house from the first half of the neighborhood has seventeen or more years of laundry behind its dryer vent. An Aldie house from the late 2010s has fewer, but a young line isn’t automatically a clean one: a crushed hose behind the dryer or a flap outside that sticks half open can pack a new run in a few years.

The condos are a smaller slice of Aldie, but they’re here: Stone Ridge lists six condo communities, from Amber Springs to Summerwalk, each with its own management company, and Kirkpatrick Farms has condos too. Inside a condo building, the dryer vent line past your wall can be common property; in a rental, about one Aldie home in ten, the landlord usually makes the call. Tell us which when you call, and the building or the owner’s name if it isn’t you.

On the old village strip along Route 50, the houses are older and the run out the wall tends to be short; the trouble is usually the flexible connector between the dryer and the wall. If a dryer vent hood there needs replacing or moving, that’s an exterior change, and the county’s Historic District Review Committee reviews most of those before work starts. Cleaning never needs it.