AC repair in Catlett.

The closest NOAA normals station is the Warrenton 3 SE co-op, about seven miles west-northwest, and its 1991 to 2020 record puts the average July high near 85, and about 21 afternoons each summer reach 90 or better. On July 22, 2011, the Weather Service estimated heat indices over 115 across southern Fauquier, and the station read 99 the next afternoon. That’s when a tired run capacitor quits, $240 to $370 to replace, or a contactor with pitted points stops closing, $290 to $425.

In a Catlett house on electric heat, and that’s half the owners, the heat most often comes from a heat pump; the Census finds no natural gas heat anywhere in 20119. So the unit you’re calling about in August spent last winter heating. The Warrenton station tallies some 4,685 heating degree days against roughly 1,020 cooling degree days, and every frosty morning is a defrost cycle a cooling-only unit never runs. When the summer fault turns out to be the defrost board, replacing it is $450 to $1,150.

Nearly 30 percent burn propane instead, and in those houses the air conditioner’s coil usually sits on the propane furnace, whose blower moves the cold air. A blower wheel caked with dust starves that coil until it ices, which looks like an outdoor problem and isn’t. Pulling the wheel and cleaning it is $300 to $440.

Then the storms. Quarter-size hail fell in Catlett on April 15, 2024, and on August 13, 2021, gusts estimated near 75 mph brought down trees along Old Dumfries Road, about two miles northwest of the village. Afterward, walk out to the unit: limbs in the fan grille, a cabinet shoved off its pad, copper lines kinked, a side of the coil beaten flat. Once it blows over, call us, and we’ll look over every part of the system before it runs hard again.