The Census counts 660 owner homes in ZIP 20137, and not one heats with utility gas. Just over half run on electricity, which in a detached house like these usually means a heat pump with electric strips behind it, and close to three in ten burn propane from a tank on the property. So a Broad Run tune-up is two different visits. On propane, the tech reads burner pressure against propane’s numbers, the temperature rise and the safeties. On a heat pump, it’s the defrost, the backup heat and the order everything comes on in, at the same $99 a system.
NOAA’s 1991 to 2020 normals from Warrenton 3 SE, the closest long temperature record at about ten miles, give a January day that peaks near 42 and a night that bottoms out near 25. About thirteen days a year never climb above freezing at all. Those are the days a heat pump leans hardest on its strips, since the outdoor unit alone often can’t keep up. Over a year, heating degree days outnumber cooling ones better than four to one.
Broad Run turns up by name in the weather record. A glaze of ice was reported at Broad Run on February 1, 2011, days after the January 26 rush-hour snowstorm left up to 6.1 inches near the village. On February 13, 2014, a volunteer gauge about three miles south-southwest logged 14 inches of snow in 24 hours. Snow that deep buries the two plastic pipes a high-efficiency propane furnace breathes through in the side wall, and it shuts itself off until somebody digs them out. A heat pump should melt its own frost every so often; one that stays a solid block of ice needs a call, not a scraper.
Late January 2026 brought Extreme Cold Warnings to the Northern Fauquier forecast zone, with Piedmont wind chills down to 10 below, after a storm had dropped 4.3 inches south of the village by 7 that morning of January 25. Neither kind of heat here runs without house current: a propane furnace’s igniter and blower are electric, and so is all of a heat pump. If the power comes back and the heat doesn’t, call us. Fauquier side or Prince William side of the line, it’s the same visit.