In Bealeton the water heater usually matches the heat, and the heat is usually electric. About seven owner homes in ten are heated electrically and fewer than one in ten have utility gas, so most tanks here are electric: no flue, no gas valve, two elements and a thermostat for each. About one owner in seven uses propane, and across all of ZIP 22712 close to one in four, where one tank in the yard often feeds the furnace and the water heater both.
Bealeton isn’t an incorporated town, so the paperwork is Fauquier County’s. An electric tank traded for a like one where the old one stood is an ordinary repair. A propane or gas heater is a fuel-fired appliance, and a heater going anywhere new counts as moved; either way the County wants a trade permit, which it hands out at the counter the day you ask.
Half of Bealeton’s owner homes went up after 1996, and the County’s plan has the community nearly doubling its homes between 2000 and 2010, mostly along Station Drive and on the west end. A 1990s house is on its second or third heater by now. One from the Station Drive years may still have the tank the builder put in, so read the date on its label before the tank decides for you.
FCWSA’s Bealeton system pumps from bedrock wells and adds a phosphate to cut corrosion, and the Authority’s part of the plumbing stops at your meter box. Above 80 psi, its rules put a pressure regulating valve on the owner. A regulator closes the door behind the incoming water, so what a tank gives off as it heats needs somewhere to go, and every installed price we give includes the expansion tank that takes it.