Eight in ten homes in 22039 were built from 1980 through 1999, and very few still run the furnace and air conditioner they started with. Where the second pair went in together, say during the 2000s, both halves are now near twenty years old or past it, and two pieces installed the same week tend to give out within a few seasons of each other. When one quits, price both.
South Run and Crosspointe show it plainly. In the South Run Census place, 94 percent of homes date from those two decades and nearly 9 in 10 owners heat with gas. Crosspointe came a little later, with a median owner home from 1993, and about three quarters of its owners heat with gas. There, replacing the system usually means a new gas furnace inside and a new condenser out back, matched and sized to the house as it stands now.
Size is the other question. With four or more bedrooms in about 9 in 10 houses, plenty carry two complete systems, the second cooling the bedrooms from the attic. Tell the estimator quiz the house is over 3,000 square feet and it says so plainly: you may need two systems, and its number is for one.
On the big lots the pair may not be gas at all. In the two Census tracts that hold most of Fairfax Station’s septic lots, electricity heats as many owner homes as gas, about 4 in 10 each. In an all-electric house the matching replacement is a heat pump and air handler, $8,499 to $21,650 installed, and in a propane house it’s a furnace converted for propane under a new air conditioner.