Jupiter Inlet Colony, 238 homes in the salt air.

What it means for your ducts

One house, one system, and an island working on the metal.

With 238 units in the whole town and 97.5% of them detached single-family, a service call in Jupiter Inlet Colony is almost never a shared building — it is one house, one system, on a lot most likely owned outright by the person living on it (96.6% owner-occupied, the highest share of the fourteen towns this crew covers). Close to half the town's homes, 45.4%, were built before 1980, old enough that the original ductwork has typically been through more than one air-handler replacement without being replaced itself.

The town sits directly at the mouth of the Jupiter Inlet, on the barrier island, so unlike towns set back from the water the salt-rich air here is constant rather than occasional. That shortens the working life of any exposed metal duct collar, dryer-vent hood or coil fin faster than it does a few miles inland, regardless of when the house was built.

So a visit here reads two things at once. Inside the runs it is the ordinary Florida story — dust, pet hair, humidity in flexible duct that has been in the attic for decades. Outside, at the hood on the wall, the collars and the fins, it is corrosion, and that is where an island house shows its age first. Both go in the report you get at the end, with photographs, whether or not either one needs work today.