At 7:35 on the morning of January 27, 2026, the weather station at Warrenton-Fauquier Airport, about five miles south of Casanova, read 3 below zero, with a wind chill of 14 below. Fauquier County sizes heating systems for a 17 degree night, so that morning every heat pump and furnace around the village was working twenty degrees past the number it was built for. It isn’t only the record mornings, either: NOAA’s Warrenton 3 SE station, three miles west-northwest, averages around 13 days a winter when the afternoon high never gets above freezing.
There’s no gas main to fall back on. The Census counts no utility gas heat at all in ZIP 20119, the area Casanova sits in; a little over half of owners heat with electricity and close to three in ten with propane from a tank on the property. A propane furnace that won’t stay lit usually comes down to a coated flame sensor, $95 to $180 to clean, or a worn igniter, $240 to $410. A high-efficiency propane furnace adds one more cold-weather weak spot, its condensate drain. Where that line runs through an unheated crawlspace or out an exterior wall, it can freeze on a single-digit night, and the furnace shuts itself down until it thaws.
In the village the heat has a different history. Its frame I-houses date from around 1900, built for stoves long before anyone thought of forced air, so whatever heats them now arrived later, sometimes pushing air through a long run of duct to the farthest rooms. When a blower motor tires in a house like that, the far bedroom goes cold first and the system runs longer to catch up. Replacing the motor is $670 to $2,400.
Storms bring the other kind of no-heat call. The March 2, 2018 windstorm sent a wave of calls to Fauquier County 911, mostly for trees and wires down, and the December 2020 ice storm coated Opal, south of Warrenton, in ice half an inch thick. When the lights come back after a night like that, a propane furnace or heat pump that stays quiet may have lost its control board to the surge, $550 to $1,180. Check the breakers and the furnace’s service switch once; if it still won’t start, call us, and we’ll go through the whole system before the next cold night.