Gas heats about seven Annandale houses in ten, and nearly eight in ten in Wakefield. All summer the burners sit cold while the blower above them works for the air conditioner, and dust settles on the burners and the flame sensor. Then the first cold night asks the furnace to light and shut down over and over until April. The tune-up reads the gas pressure and the temperature rise with the panel off, so a weak part shows up in October, not at 2 a.m. in January.
The furnace in a 1967 house is rarely its first, so Annandale basements hold both kinds. A standard-efficiency furnace still exhausts up the masonry chimney, usually beside the water heater; a high-efficiency one pipes it out a side wall in PVC and drips condensate into a trap. After a summer off, the first tends to trip on a flue that isn’t drawing, the second on a blocked trap or vent.
Inside 22003 the heat changes with the street. Wakefield is about 95 homes in 100 single-family, so the furnace there is mostly gas, on the lowest floor, with the AC coil on top. In the Annandale Census place, with its condo buildings around Little River Turnpike and Columbia Pike, and in Woodburn, about a quarter of owners heat with electricity, most often a heat pump with a closet air handler. That isn’t a furnace, but a heat pump and its closet air handler are one system, and its fall tune-up is the same $99.
About three Annandale homes in ten are rented, and four in ten in Woodburn. For an apartment or a leased condo, Fairfax County wants heat that keeps every habitable room at 68 degrees or more from October 15, so a landlord’s tune-up belongs in late September or early October, with time left to fix whatever it turns up.