Carpet cleaning, air duct cleaning and dryer vent cleaning in Maple Grove, we’re one town north.

Maple Grove started putting in public sewer around 1970 and the houses came after it, and the city’s own plan calls it a second tier suburb and puts only about 4.8 percent of the housing stock before 1970, so there’s almost none of the old stuff here and we don’t run into octopus furnaces or gravity ducts. Street after street it’s sheet metal trunk and branch, which is the kind of system a rotary brush was built for.

After that it kept going for thirty years, with the 1980s the biggest decade at 6,500 homes, then the 1990s at 5,449, the 2000s at 5,215 and the 1970s at 5,126, so two thirds of every home in the city was standing before 2000. The census puts the median owner occupied house at 1990, which makes the typical one about 36 years old, and development started in the northeast and the southeast in the late 1970s and worked west, so the oldest ductwork in town is on the east side and the newest is out past it.

What matters more than the age is how long people stay, and about 3,364 households moved in between 1990 and 1999 with another 3,123 already in before that, so roughly a quarter of Maple Grove has been in the same house for twenty five years or more and nobody in that group ever had a move that made them think about the ducts. We’re not going to tell you yours have never been opened because we can’t know that from here, but we’ll tell you what we find when we open them, and if it doesn’t need doing we’ll say so and leave.

It’s a city that’s home during the day too, with around 24.8 percent of workers here working from home and 26.7 percent of households having someone sixty five or older in them, which is a lot of people breathing the same air for a lot of hours.

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.

86 percent of the housing here is single family, 18,451 detached houses and 6,259 attached townhomes out of 28,660 units, and nearly 83 percent of the occupied ones are owner occupied, so the person reading this is usually the person who decides.

A third of Maple Grove households have at least one child in them and the city counts more than fifty parks and over fifty five miles of trails, so what we see most days is a traffic lane worn down the middle of a hallway, a landing at the top of the stairs and whatever the trail brought back in on two feet or four.

It’s 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 unit pulls, and if we clean in the morning it’s dry by the evening in normal conditions.

6,259 of the homes in this city are attached townhomes and the city expects attached housing to keep being the part that grows, with the detached share going from 74 percent in 1994 to 62 percent in 2017 and Maple Grove projecting 55 percent at full build out. Townhome dryer runs are long, they turn and they share a wall, so lint has far more places to sit down than it does in a rambler.

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.

Anyone who tells you this city is built out hasn’t read its plan, because as of 2018 it was about 85 percent developed or open space, with roughly 1,200 acres of vacant residential land and seven areas still to be master planned, including the Northwest 610 Area, 105th Avenue, Elm Road, Territorial Road and the Gravel Mining Area. If you’re moving into something brand new out that way the ductwork has had an entire build go on around it before you ever got the keys, so it’s worth a phone call before you unpack.

Arbor Lakes is its own thing, with Main Street going up between 1997 and 2001, the Shoppes in 2003, the Fountains in 2007 and the Village in 2016, all of it on former gravel mine land. The condos, apartments and townhomes around it are a younger, denser kind of home than the 1980s houses further out and they get cleaned differently.