The Census counts 660 owner homes in ZIP 20137, all of them detached houses, and none of them heats with utility gas. Just over half use electricity, about 29 percent burn propane and about one in seven still burn oil. A hot water boiler out here usually burns propane delivered by truck, so the regulator and the line from the tank matter as much as the boiler does.
The oil burners in the one owner home in seven that still runs on oil aren’t ours to work on, but a propane boiler on the same radiators or baseboard, or a heat pump, is.
The typical owner’s house here went up in 1979, just over half are older than 1980 and about one in six is older than 1960. Those houses mostly vent their boilers up a chimney in metal pipe. Keeping the chimney means another cast iron boiler like the one coming out; going condensing, at $12,782 to $16,500, trades the chimney for a plastic vent through the wall.
Most of Broad Run is in Fauquier County, which wants a permit for any fuel-fired appliance, so a propane boiler swapped in the same spot still takes one; the Prince William side, where about one home in six sits, has the same rule for gas and propane. At about 415 feet near the Bull Run Mountains, January’s average low sits near 25 degrees and about 98 nights a year reach freezing, so a boiler here carries the house for months. Broad Run sits beside Thoroughfare Gap, 2.0 miles from the Bull Run Mountains, and Fauquier sizes heat for a 17 degree day. In April 2017 an EF0 tornado snapped trees along Airlie and Blantyre Roads near the hamlet, and a February 2014 storm left 14.0 inches of snow 2.9 miles south-southwest.