Fairfax County’s assessment records show gas service on only about half of Oakton’s homes, and the split runs by decade: detached houses from the 1970s are gas connected less than a third of the time, those from the 1990s and 2000s 93 percent of the time. So the newer house on an Oakton street is the likelier one to have a furnace, and it may well have two.
Hearthstone Village, Timber Lake, Willow Creek Estates, Wheatland Farms, Fairwinds, Hannah Hills and Bridges of Oakton are the clearest case: 333 houses, nearly all on gas, with a median of about 4,700 square feet above ground. A house that size often splits its heat between a basement furnace for the main floors and an attic one for the bedrooms, each its own tune-up at $99.
The attic furnace is the one to watch. Its blower pushed the bedroom cooling all summer through an attic that bakes, and a high-efficiency model up there makes water every time it burns, draining through a trap, a line and a pan right over the bedroom ceilings. A 1995 house still on the builder’s pair is past 30 winters. The tune-up lights each furnace and runs it all the way through, so a slow igniter or a lazy inducer shows itself on a mild October day.
Some attached homes burn gas too: the county lists it on every unit of the Oakton condominium on Oakton Terrace Road and nearly all of Concord Village, Wyant Property and Oakton Manor, and a gas furnace in a closet or basement there gets the same visit as any house. On the big 1970s and 80s lots where no main reaches, a gas furnace runs on propane from a tank, about four in a hundred Oakton owner homes by the Census count, and the tech reads its burner pressure against propane’s settings.