Carpet cleaning, air duct cleaning and dryer vent cleaning in Rogers, we’re due east of you.

Only 557 houses in the whole city went up before 1990, 11.5 percent of the stock, so the octopus furnaces and the gravity ducts that turn a job in an older town into an afternoon of working around somebody’s 1920s aren’t much of a Rogers problem, and on ductwork put in this recently a rotary brush does the thing it was built to do. The census puts the median house at 2004, and the three big decades sit within about ninety units of each other, 1,345 in the 1990s, 1,318 in the 2000s and 1,257 in the 2010s, so there isn’t one era to point at.

The city keeps its own count off its own records rather than the census, and it had 844 housing units standing in 1990 and 3,748 by 2010, and its housing chapter puts 1,775 of those in the 2000 to 2010 window alone, 42 percent of everything it had in 2017, off the back of what the plan calls “unprecedented residential, commercial and industrial development between 1998 and 2008,” so that’s the biggest single block of housing in the city and it’s sitting somewhere between sixteen and twenty six years old now.

The township half of the city isn’t on sewer at all. The plan says Rogers “has a relatively large number of private subsurface sewage treatment systems” and that most of them came in with the annexation, and it counted 948 households, 2,844 people, on their own septic out of 4,041 households at the time. Another 118 households heat on bottled or tank gas rather than off the utility main, and the city zones two acre and five acre rural estate lots out there, with 5,820 acres of Rogers still counted as agricultural land in the 2019 plan, so what gets walked into a house with a field on the other side of the fence isn’t what gets walked into one on a sewered street in town.

1,407 of the owners here moved in before 2010, better than a third of them, and a move is usually the thing that makes somebody think about the ducts for the first time. 1,672 of the working people who live in Rogers work from home and 998 households have somebody sixty five or over in them, so that’s a lot of hours spent in the same air. We won’t tell you off a website that yours have never been opened, because that isn’t something anybody can know about your house from a page, but we’ll show you what comes out once we’re in there.

Every house gets the same three things, powerful vacuum, compressed air and rotary brush, and there isn’t a version of this where we skip one. We sometimes cut more than two access points in the trunk lines. We never charge for more than two.

4,062 of the 4,786 households here own the place they’re in, near enough six in seven, so we’re usually talking to whoever’s money it is. The census puts 3.02 people in the average owner occupied house in Rogers, and the city made the point itself before we did, its 3.00 against Hennepin County’s 2.38 and the metro’s 2.51, which the plan calls the opposite of the trend of declining household sizes throughout Minnesota.

2,235 households, 46.7 percent of them, have somebody under eighteen living there, and kids live on the floor. The city’s got 32 parks on 601 acres plus the 2,188 acre Crow Hassan Park Reserve along the western boundary, which it works out at “35 acres of parks and open spaces per 1,000 residents,” and all of that walks back in on shoes and on paws, so the carpet in a house like that gives out in the same few places every time, the strip of hallway everybody uses, the stairs, and the couple of feet inside whichever door the dog comes through.

The machine for that never comes inside, because it’s truck mounted hot water extraction and the suction off a truck mount takes far more water back out of the carpet than a portable can, so a morning clean is dry by the evening in normal conditions.

3,553 homes in Rogers are detached houses and another 583 are attached townhomes, which between them is 85.2 percent of the 4,853 units in the city. An attached home sits the dryer further inside the building than a rambler does and the run turns more than once on its way out through the wall, so there’s a lot more of it for lint to settle in before any of it reaches the outside.

There’s one limit on this and we’d rather it sat on the page than came up in your driveway. Ground level only. We do not do roof vents or anything twenty feet up. So it’s the houses and the townhomes we’re talking about here, and anything running up the outside of one of the apartment blocks is somebody else’s job.

61 houses in Rogers date from 1939 or earlier, out of 4,853 units, and the old part of town is still standing, the Main Street south of I-94 between County 81 and the railroad that the city describes as “a traditional Main Street” holding “many of its original buildings, oriented to the street.” There’s Fletcher Hamlet out on Territorial Road as well, a state historic district and the last of two hamlets in Hennepin County. A house from that end of town is exactly the kind where you’d hear the number from us before we started rather than after we finished.

At the other end the city’s own key developments page lists Skye Meadows at 363 units off Territorial Road, Big Woods Crossing at 207 between Territorial Road and 129th Avenue, and a 122 home Lennar development east of Skye Meadows, all of it planned or in progress, so nobody should be telling you Rogers is finished. If you’ve just closed on one of those, the whole build happened around ductwork that was sitting open the entire time, and a fair amount of what a build makes ends up down there.