Carpet cleaning, air duct cleaning and dryer vent cleaning in Ham Lake, we make the trip for the bigger jobs.

Ham Lake has no municipal sewer system at all, and the 2040 plan says it in plain words, that there’s no municipal sewer in the city and homes and businesses are served by individual or community septic systems. That isn’t a temporary state either, because the Metropolitan Council doesn’t plan to extend service up here and the sewered growth options studied in 2008 were rejected. You can’t plat a small lot without sewer, so the city holds a one acre minimum and most single family lots run from 1 acre to 2 1/2 acres, which is why the houses are big and detached and the trunk lines inside them are long.

There isn’t one typical Ham Lake house and the census won’t hand us one, with 1,268 homes built in the 1970s, 666 in the 1980s, 1,302 in the 1990s and 1,391 in the 2000s out of 6,014 units, so the three waves land within about 120 houses of each other. The city puts 87 percent of its housing stock up since 1970 and the median owner occupied home went in during 1994, so whichever of the three waves your house came out of there’s sheet metal behind the registers and a rotary brush is what gets a trunk line like that clean.

Of the 5,573 owner occupied homes here, 3,181 households moved in during 2009 or earlier and 1,529 of those have been in the same house since 1999 or earlier, and a move is usually what makes somebody think about the ducts. We can’t tell you from a website what’s in yours and we won’t try, but you’ll hear what we find once the trunk line is open, and we pass on a lot of jobs because we don’t want people spending money they don’t have to.

Every house gets the same three things, powerful vacuum, compressed air and rotary brush, and on a system with more than one trunk and a long run out to the far bedrooms there’s more for the brush to reach than there is in a small rambler. We sometimes cut more than two access points in the trunk lines. We never charge for more than two.

5,086 of the 6,014 homes in this city are single family detached and only 197 sit in a building of five units or more, so what we’re cleaning is somebody’s own house with its own furnace and its own front door. About 94 percent of the city is owner occupied by the plan’s reading of the 2010 census, and current census figures put it at 93.7 percent, so there’s hardly ever a landlord in the middle of the conversation.

Nearly a third of Ham Lake, 32 percent, isn’t suitable for development because of wetlands and poor soils, with eight of the 36 square miles wetland and another three in sod fields. Long approaches and yards like that mean sand and grit come in on shoes and paws, and on a lot this size there’s a lot of ground between where you park and where you take your boots off.

There’s no municipal water anywhere in this city and every property is on its own well, so the van brings its own water up with it rather than drawing off your softener, and the machine never comes through the door either, because it’s a truck mount and it pulls far more water back out of the carpet than a portable does.

The city counts 272 townhomes across twelve subdivisions, built between 1992 and 2004 and sitting mostly in the southwest quadrant, which is the one part of Ham Lake that looks like a normal suburb, and a dryer run that climbs, turns and shares a wall with the next unit gives lint somewhere to settle at every bend. Out on the acre lots it’s a different reason and the same answer, because a laundry room sitting in the middle of a big house is a long way from the nearest outside wall.

There’s one thing we can’t do and you should know it before you book rather than after. Ground level only. We do not do roof vents or anything twenty feet up.

Around Coon Lake, Little Coon Lake, Lake Netta and Ham Lake itself, the plan says some of the lots have been in existence for nearly ninety years, and that many of the smaller ones were first platted for cabin or seasonal recreational use with most now converted to permanent homes. A converted cabin is its own kind of job, with a small original footprint, rooms added on at different times and heat retrofitted into a building nobody laid out around a furnace, so the ductwork in one isn’t often the tidy trunk and branch we find on the acre lots.

If that’s your house, tell us on the phone what got added and roughly when, and we’ll work out whether the flat $329 covers it or whether yours is a different number.