AC tune-up in Middleburg.

Most of what cools a Middleburg house heats it too. Across ZIP 20117, 582 of the 927 owner homes heat with electricity, which out here usually means a heat pump; utility gas reaches only 41. NOAA’s normals for the Purcellville co-op station, twelve miles north, count 4,942 heating degree days a year against 1,050 for cooling, so the unit you book in April has just finished its hard months. The spring visit turns it around: coil and fan cleaned, drain line cleared, and a write-up on how the winter left it.

Summer still has teeth. July afternoons at that station average 86.4 degrees, and on July 28, 2023 weather stations all over western Loudoun logged heat indices above 110.

The older half of 20117 was never built for central air. Of the ZIP’s 1,416 homes, 333 went up in 1939 or earlier, and the cooling in those came decades later: usually an air handler in the attic, or a ductless mini split where ducts couldn’t go. The attic unit’s drain line and the pan under it sit right over the bedroom ceilings, often plaster in a house that age, so clearing that line is the part of the visit an old Middleburg house can least afford to skip.

Storms here arrive through the trees. On June 21, 2021, winds estimated near 69 miles an hour blew down trees around Middleburg, including on Washington Street near Chestnut Street, and in June 2016 hail damaged windows just east of town. Before the cooling goes back on, walk out to the unit: a branch in the fan, fins flattened by hail, a cabinet dented or shoved off its pad. If high water reaches it, the way Goose Creek rose past flood stage at the Middleburg gauge on September 30, 2015 and started over Notre Dame Lane, keep it off. Call us after the storm and we’ll check it all over before it runs.