Appliance Repair in Reston, VA

Lake Anne, Reston Town Center and North Reston (20190): Lake Anne Village Center, built from 1963 to 1967 and now a historic district, with Heron House beside it; Reston Town Center, open since 1990; the North Point and Tall Oaks village centers; and both Silver Line stations, Wiehle–Reston East (2014) and Reston Town Center (2022), along the Dulles Toll Road.

South Lakes, Hunters Woods, Lake Thoreau and Lake Audubon (20191): The Hunters Woods and South Lakes village centers, Glade, and lakeside townhouse clusters around Lake Thoreau, built in the early 1970s, and Lake Audubon. The Reston Association owns and maintains the lakes, the paths and the open space in both ZIPs.

Townhouses in Reston usually keep the washer and dryer upstairs, near the bedrooms, which is exactly where the laundry is generated and exactly where a leak does the most damage. Water from a failed hose or a torn door boot runs through the floor and shows up on the ceiling of the room below.

A drain pan under the washer, braided supply hoses and a shutoff valve you can reach without moving the machine are inexpensive and worth having. If you see a stain on the ceiling under the laundry, shut off the water to the washer and call before running another load.

Upstairs washers with leaking hoses or door boots, dryers venting through a second-floor wall or up through the roof, cluster kitchens with refrigerators and dishwashers in tight openings, and condo laundry tied into building ductwork.

Refrigerators in Reston's older cluster townhouses, near Lake Anne and Hunters Woods, often fill kitchens drawn up in the 1960s and 70s, while the Reston Town Center high-rises have counter-depth units set flush into the cabinetry.

Washers in Reston townhouses often sit upstairs in a hall closet or stacked in a kitchen alcove, so a leak can reach the living room ceiling, and cluster associations may have their own rules about hoses and drain pans.

Dryer ducts in Reston's clusters often snake between adjoining walls to reach the outside, and in the condo buildings near the Town Center the exhaust path may belong to the building rather than the unit.

Many Reston single-family houses and townhouses cook on Washington Gas, while the high-rise condos around the Town Center and Wiehle–Reston East station are mostly electric, often induction in the newer buildings.

In a cluster, tell us which parking area is nearest your door and whether visitor spaces are marked, since the walk from the lot can be a real distance with tools and parts. In a condo building, send the management's contractor rules. If the washer is upstairs, know where your main water shutoff is before the visit; if a hose has already failed, turning that valve is the first thing to do.

The washer and dryer are usually in a closet or small laundry room on the bedroom floor of the cluster townhouses, a stacked pair in the condos, and a basement or first-floor room in the detached houses.

Tap water in Reston is Fairfax Water's, drawn from the Potomac and the Occoquan Reservoir. It leaves a light scale wherever it sits and dries, and in an appliance that means the narrowest passages: the screen at the back of a washer, the fill valve feeding an ice maker, the jets on a dishwasher's spray arms. When an ice maker's cubes come out small or hollow, a restricted valve or a filter past its date is a likelier cause than the ice maker itself.

In the townhouse clusters of Reston, the car stays in a shared lot and the house is reached along a footpath, sometimes down a slope or across a bridge over a stream. It's a pleasant walk with a coffee and a less pleasant one with a toolbag and a new washer pump.

Tell us which lot is nearest your door and whether visitor spaces are marked, and send the model number ahead of time so everything needed comes along on the first walk in. If an appliance has to come out, we'll plan the route along the path first.

In Reston, a townhouse or condo can sit under two associations at once, the community-wide one and its own cluster or condo board. For appliances, the rules that matter most are the ones on the building's exterior: where a dryer vent may exit, what a replacement vent hood has to look like, and where contractors may park.

Inside your home, a repair is yours to arrange. If fixing a dryer properly means changing the vent's route or hood, we'll tell you, and you can clear it with your board before anything is done.

Closest to Reston on our map: Ashburn; Fairfax & Vienna; and Falls Church. Each has its own page, linked below, with local notes and its ZIP codes.