Carpet cleaning, air duct cleaning and dryer vent cleaning in Prior Lake, we come down to Scott County for the big ones.

Prior Lake doesn’t run the way most of this metro does. The census counts 10,357 housing units in the city and puts 2,632 of them, 25.4 percent, in the ten years from 2000 to 2009, which is the biggest decade by a distance, with another 1,947 in the 2010s and 1,819 in the 1990s, and only 1,144 units standing here before 1970. The city says the same thing in its own words in its housing chapter, that between 2000 and 2010 the community’s housing supply increased over 50 percent at a growth rate of five percent per year and then slowed to five percent total between 2010 and 2015, and its land use chapter counts permits for 2,961 housing units in the seven years from 2000 to 2006 alone.

So the job here usually isn’t a fifty year old system. The census puts the median owner occupied house in Prior Lake at 1997, which makes the typical one about twenty nine years old, and because so much of the city went up at once, a street tends to share a build year rather than spread across three decades. It isn’t finished building either, with a 2004 orderly annexation agreement that will eventually add roughly 3,000 acres and a study the city started in 2025 covering about 2,730 acres in the south west corner, so if yours is one of the newest ones then an entire build went on around that ductwork before anybody handed you the keys.

People stay put here, with 86.2 percent of the 9,976 occupied homes owner occupied and the census putting the median owner householder’s move in year at 2013, so half the owners in Prior Lake have been in the same house a dozen years or more without a closing or a walkthrough anywhere in the middle of it to put the ductwork in front of them. Whether yours have ever been opened is a question about your house rather than about the year your street went up, and a page like this one can’t answer it, so we’ll get a panel off and you’ll hear what’s in there, including that it doesn’t need doing if that’s what we find.

It’s a gas furnace town, with 8,190 of those occupied homes running on utility gas, and 24.6 percent of the city’s workers work from home, so that’s 3,729 people breathing their own house’s air all day. 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.

87.3 percent of the housing in Prior Lake is single family, 7,239 detached houses and 1,801 attached townhomes out of 10,357 units, and 38.7 percent of the households here have somebody under eighteen living in them, so what we’re called out for most is a family house with a whole floor of carpet in it rather than a room or two.

The water is the reason those floors look the way they do. The city’s plan counts 14 lakes, more than 57 parks across a thousand acres and over 100 miles of trails and sidewalks, with Prior Lake itself at 1,340 acres sitting in the center of the city and called one of the busiest lakes in the seven county metropolitan area, and Upper and Lower Prior Lake bisecting the whole place from south west to north east. The Census Gazetteer puts 3.25 of the city’s 19.54 square miles under water, so plenty of front doors here are a short walk from a shoreline, and what comes back through them is beach sand and whatever’s been on the trail that week.

The machine never comes in the house, because it’s truck mounted hot water extraction and it stays out in the van, which pulls far more water back out of the carpet than any portable unit does, and a morning clean is dry by that evening in normal conditions. From this end of the metro it’s worth putting a whole floor on one visit rather than a single room, and small carpet jobs come up to the $129 minimum for a visit anyway.

The city wrote this one down itself, and it’s the clearest table in the plan. Single family attached housing was 9 percent of Prior Lake’s stock in 2000, 20 percent by 2010 and 20 percent still in 2015, while detached went from 79 percent to 67 and back to 69, so a townhome boom got bolted onto a lake town inside one ten year window. The census counts 1,801 attached homes here today, and an attached dryer run has to go further, take more corners and share a wall on the way, so lint has a lot more places to sit down than it does in a rambler.

That’s also the booking that makes the drive worth making. If you’re the one who handles the maintenance for a row, tell us how many units there are and where the vents come out, and we’ll price the lot of them over the phone, because half a dozen in one afternoon is worth coming down for in a way that a single one isn’t.

We’d rather have the one limit we’ve got printed on this page than drive the whole metro and say it standing in your driveway. Ground level only. We do not do roof vents or anything twenty feet up. So if your vent comes out a floor or two up, which it usually does in the 651 units the census counts here in buildings of fifty or more, say so on the phone and we’ll save you the wait and us the trip.

Prior Lake runs 107 miles of sanitary sewer main and 41 lift stations under nineteen and a half square miles, which is a lot of pumping for a city this size, and the plan’s plain about why, because Red Oaks needs four lift stations across 212 acres south of Lower Prior Lake on account of low elevations, Frost Point needs three across 231 acres and Candy Cove needs three across 42, and it calls all three of them fully developed residential areas.

146 places here aren’t on any of that. The plan counts that many individual on site treatment systems still in use and says they “lie in older portions of the City where sewer infrastructure is not yet available and on agricultural lands,” with Scott County rather than the city doing the permitting and the inspections, and the zoning backs it up, because the rural subdivision district “is only used for preexisting subdivisions currently served by private individual septic systems” and the rural density class allows one house per forty acres with no public utilities at all. That’s an older house on a much bigger lot than the subdivisions carry, and it’s worth telling us so when you call.

The lake streets have their own history and it isn’t the city’s. Prior Lake extended city sewer and water out to roughly 95 parcels in the South Shore Drive area of Spring Lake Township in 1998 and to roughly 125 parcels in the Vergus Avenue area in 2003, the second one, in the city’s own words, “to resolve environmental concerns due to failing septic systems in the Vergus area,” and about 90 percent of the South Shore parcels and about 75 percent of the Vergus ones are connected to city utilities today.

There’s still a seasonal side to these lakes as well, because 166 of the 381 vacant housing units the census counts in Prior Lake are held for seasonal, recreational or occasional use, and the plan says that across 2000, 2010 and 2015 most of the city’s vacancies were the same thing. A place that gets opened up in spring and shut again in the fall is a natural one to put the carpet and the ducts into the same visit, and that’s the sort of afternoon that’s worth the drive from our end.