Watertown is where SR 100 ends and our Lake City route begins

A company town that outlived its company

Watertown grew up around a lumber operation big enough to run its own bank, commissary and scrip. The sawmill and the rail yards are gone, but the housing they built is still here: rows of narrow frame houses on pier foundations, some with the original tin roofs, most with air conditioning added in pieces over the decades. A window unit in the front room, a through-wall unit in the back bedroom, maybe a small split system someone put in during the 1990s with ductwork that was never quite right.

Around and behind those streets, on the roads off US 90 and SR 100, are the mobile homes. Watertown today is about 3,000 people in a census-designated place on Lake City’s eastern edge, and a large share of them live in manufactured housing with a package unit beside the home and a belly duct under the floor.

Two kinds of houses, two kinds of air conditioning, one set of problems that are specific to each.

The frame houses

A mill-era frame house has no wall insulation to speak of, a lot of air moving through the floor, and very little room above the ceiling. Central air in a house like that was usually added as an afterthought. What we find when we open these up:

• Ductwork run through a crawlspace, sweating in August and feeding moisture into the floor.
• Returns that are far too small for the equipment, which starves the system and freezes the coil.
• An outdoor unit whose pad has settled and tilted, stressing the copper line set.
• Electrical that was upgraded once, in the 1970s, and never again.

The right answer for many of these houses is ductless. Two or three wall-mounted heads, one outdoor unit, no duct in the crawlspace at all. It costs less than people expect, it dehumidifies the house properly for the first time, and it replaces a collection of window units that were each drawing full power.

The mobile homes

The manufactured side of Watertown has its own list. The unit is usually a package system sitting on the ground, with a short crossover duct into a belly board that runs the length of the home. The belly is the weak point. It tears, it sags, it gets chewed, and when it fails the system blows cold air into the dirt under the home while the living room stays at 80.

The calls we get from these addresses: a unit that runs constantly, a floor that feels damp, an electric bill that doubled, and in winter a heat strip that runs for hours because the heat pump side gave up years ago and nobody noticed. We bring a flashlight and a mirror and look under the home before we talk about equipment.

What matters most here

Watertown has a high share of rentals, and a lot of the landlords live elsewhere. We can set up a maintenance schedule for a rental and report to the owner directly, with the terms of the agreement to be confirmed [[CONFIRM WITH JERRY]].

Power, water and the hazards

Inside the CDP, FPL is the electric utility and most homes are on Lake City Utilities water. On the outer roads the meters switch to Clay Electric and the water comes from a well, with the scale that Floridan aquifer water leaves on anything it touches. Watertown is low and flat; the rain from a June thunderstorm sits around outdoor units on ground-level pads, and we raise replacement units on stands for that reason. The nearer hazard, every summer, is lightning. Surge protection at the disconnect is cheap insurance on a package unit that stands in an open yard.

The road in

Watertown is the first Columbia County stop on the trip out from Palm Coast, where Cook’s keeps its only shop at 37 Fairmont Ln. The trip is a little over two hours, most of it on SR 100 through farm country, and the truck arrives at the US 90 light with Watertown on both sides of it. That makes this the most reachable address on our Lake City run and the best candidate for a same-day slot. Calls answered at every hour, weekend or weekday the invoice is the same, every brand repaired, Lennox installed.