Fort Hunt is the plainest gas furnace neighborhood on the Alexandria address: nearly every home is a detached house, the typical owner’s went up in 1963, and about 8 in 10 heat with gas. A house that age is likely on its third or fourth furnace, down in the basement. Hayfield, its typical house from 1978, has close to 9 in 10 on gas. There the tune-up comes down to readings: the gas pressure read at the valve and the temperature rise from return to supply, checked against the range on the furnace’s rating plate.
Kingstowne went up mostly in the late 1980s and 1990s, close to half of it townhouses, with roughly 7 in 10 owners burning gas. Plenty of the builder’s furnaces have been replaced by now, often with a high-efficiency model venting out the wall in white plastic pipe. On those the tune-up watches the whole start: the inducer spins up, the pressure switch proves the vent is clear, the igniter glows, the gas valve opens, the flame sensor proves the flame, and the blower comes on. That’s the sequence of operation, and a furnace that stumbles in it on a mild October day will do it again in January.
Inside the City we still work on boilers and radiators; on the Fairfax County side they’re rarer. A boiler’s tune-up is the same $99 a system as a furnace’s, and so is a heat pump’s in Franconia or Woodlawn. More than half the City’s homes are in condo and apartment buildings, where the furnace is often a compact unit in a hall closet. The City’s own winter safety page asks for three feet of clear space around heating equipment, a carbon monoxide alarm on every level of the home and outside the bedrooms, and the furnace vent dug out of the snow after a storm. In a closet, those three feet are the hard part, so clear it out before the visit.
Propane is rare on the Alexandria address, but Hybla Valley has the most: close to 1 in 20 homeowners there heat with it. Propane furnaces are set up for a higher gas pressure than natural gas ones, so the tune-up reads yours against propane’s numbers. Franconia and Woodlawn lean electric, and there a gas furnace is the smaller share of the heat.