Carpet cleaning, air duct cleaning and dryer vent cleaning in Andover, we’re across the river in Champlin.

Andover’s own plan tells the story in one paragraph and we can’t improve on it: “Andover was a rural, agricultural community for most of its early existence. Suburban development began in the 1960’s, primarily in the western sections of the City. Lot sizes varied from less than an acre on up and were served by private well and septic systems. Municipal sewer service arrived in 1976, contributing to tremendous growth in the southern quarter of the City. Sewer line extension spurred new home development throughout the 1990’s.” So the oldest suburban houses here are the ones out west that went up on their own well and septic before the pipe existed, and everything the pipe made possible came in south of them.

The Anoka County Assessor counted the housing stock for the city in 2018 and the 1990s win it by a distance, with 3,600 homes built between 1990 and 1999 against 2,079 in the 1980s, 1,982 in the 2000s and 1,501 in the 1970s, so about a third of Andover went up inside one decade and they’re 27 to 36 years old now, on the ductwork they were built with. The census measures it a different way and puts the median Andover home at 1994, with 7,459 of the 11,157 units in the city standing before 2000.

There’s almost nothing genuinely old to run into either, because the city writes that “There are no pre-1970’s era sewer mains or service lines within the City” and counts 836 out of 10,800 homes, 7.7 percent, built in 1970 or prior, and 89 percent of households here heat with utility gas. That’s post-1970 sheet metal trunk and branch at street after street, which is the kind of system a rotary brush was built for, and we don’t turn up in Andover and find a gravity duct out of somebody’s grandparents’ farmhouse.

People don’t leave either, and of the 10,324 owner occupied homes in the city, 2,548 have had the same household in them since 1999 or earlier, which is 24.7 percent of every owner in Andover, and 47.6 percent have been in place since 2009 or earlier, so there’s been no closing and no inspection in between to make anybody think about what’s behind the registers. We’re not going to tell you from a website that yours have never been opened, because we can’t know that, but we’ll show you what’s in there once the covers are off, and if it doesn’t need doing we’ll say so and leave.

There’s somebody home in a lot of these houses too, with 20.7 percent of Andover’s workers, 3,642 of 17,575, working from home and 30.7 percent of households having somebody sixty five or over living in them, and the city issued 1,065 residential building permits in 2025 for additions, decks, remodeling and sheds on top of the 102 new houses it put up, so there’s a lot of sawdust and drywall dust going into open ductwork in this town every year. It’s the same three things at every house, powerful vacuum, compressed air and rotary brush, and all three of them go in every time. We sometimes cut more than two access points in the trunk lines. We never charge for more than two.

94.1 percent of the occupied homes in Andover are owner occupied, 10,324 of 10,970, and the city puts it in its own plan as “Greater than ninety percent of the city’s housing stock is owner occupied,” so whoever’s reading this is nearly always the one who decides. They’re big houses as well, with 6,167 of the 11,157 units carrying four bedrooms or more and only 1,112 at two bedrooms or fewer, which is more rooms and more stairs than a price built off a metro average is expecting.

The plan says Andover “has one of the highest average household sizes in the Twin Cities area, at 3.28 persons per household,” and the city runs 69 parks and four open space properties, with the 1,600 acres of Bunker Hills Regional Park sitting in the southeast corner and running over into Blaine, Coon Rapids and Ham Lake, so most of what we’re called out for walked in on somebody’s feet or paws: the lane worn down the middle of a hallway, the landing at the top of the stairs, and whatever came back from the trail.

The city gives its municipal water an average hardness of 13 grains and built the plant on Crosstown Boulevard in 2002 to take iron and manganese back out of it, while the north end of town is drawing off private wells with no municipal treatment on them at all, and that’s the water that ends up going through whatever machine gets used on your carpet. Ours is truck mounted hot water extraction, so the machine stays out in the van and far more water comes back out of the carpet than any portable pulls, and if we clean in the morning it’s dry by the evening in normal conditions.

91.5 percent of the housing in Andover is single family detached, 10,214 houses, against 591 attached townhomes and 310 units in buildings of ten or more, so the shared wall dryer story doesn’t fit here at all and nobody’s lint but yours is in your run. What you’ve got instead is a house that’s bigger than average, over half of them at four bedrooms or more, and a run that has further to travel before it reaches an outside wall.

40 percent of Andover households have somebody under eighteen in them, 4,393 of 10,970, which is a lot of loads through a dryer over a year, and lint doesn’t ask for anything more complicated than that. There’s one limit and we’d rather print it here than have you find out on the day. Ground level only. We do not do roof vents or anything twenty feet up.

The wastewater plan opens with the split and doesn’t dress it up: “The Metropolitan Urban Service Area (MUSA) boundary in general bisects Andover into a northern and southern portion. The southern portion of the City is served by municipal sanitary sewer. The northern portion of the City has individual sewage treatment systems (ISTS).” In 2018 that was roughly 23,100 residents on city sewer, 70.5 percent, and 9,658 who weren’t, and in household terms the city counted 3,216 unsewered households out of 10,391 in 2016 and still forecasts 3,400 out of 13,500 in 2040, so the north end isn’t a pocket waiting to be tidied up and it’ll still be on its own fifteen years from now.

It’s held that way on purpose, because Rural Residential carries a 2.5 acre minimum lot “to provide sufficient space for onsite sewer and water facilities,” with anything smaller only in ground subdivided before 1978 and in the two approved rural developments, Nightingale Preserve and Timber River Estates, and above that sits roughly a thousand acres of Rural Reserve held at one parcel per ten acres until a master plan and municipal service can reach it. A lot that size has room on it for a house with longer trunk lines and more registers in it than a subdivision house, and the flat $329 stops at 2,500 square feet, so out that way it’s worth a phone call rather than a guess.

If you’re on a system up there you already run to a calendar, because the city code has you inspect it and file a report every two years, pump it at a minimum every three, and put right anything that fails inside six months, and the Building Department keeps the records for every system in the city. Nobody in that half of Andover needs it explained why something you can’t see gets looked at on a schedule, and ductwork’s the same argument with a longer gap between visits.