ZIP 20106’s median owner home went up in 1993, and the rest spread wide: about one in eight before 1960, about a third from 1980 through 1999 and about three in ten since 2000. A house at the median age is on, at best, its second furnace and air conditioner. One from 2000 or later may still have the builder’s pair, now well into its twenties.
A furnace with an air conditioner is the setup where propane or gas does the heating: about four owner homes in ten here burn propane, and about two in a hundred have utility gas. The electric houses, a bit over a third, replace with a heat pump system instead, $8,499 to $21,650 installed. At the Boston station heating degree days outnumber cooling degree days, 4,836 to 936, so the furnace is the unit in the pair that does most of the work.
Both ends of the range come up. That station hit 100 degrees on July 8 and 9, 2012, logs about 22 days a year at 90 or higher, and counts about 120 nights at or below freezing, with 12 below zero on January 7, 2014. A house needs cooling sized for the hot afternoons and heating sized for the cold nights, and heating carries the bigger share of the year.
About one owner home in eight here heats with oil. We don’t work on oil burners, so those houses come to us as a switch, and a furnace and AC pair or a heat pump system is what we price. A gas or propane furnace in the pair is permit work in Rappahannock County, Culpeper County and Fauquier County alike; the offices are in Washington, Culpeper and Warrenton.