None of the 1,040 owner homes in ZIP 20119 heat with utility gas in the Census count. About 300 burn propane from a tank the supplier fills, and the pressure the tech reads at the furnace’s gas valve, burners lit, gets checked against the propane setting on the furnace’s data plate. About 530 heat with electricity, mostly heat pumps, and a heat pump tune-up is the same $99 a system: heating mode, the defrost and the backup heat, run while October is still mild.
Cedar Run is the local wrinkle. Fauquier County’s plan rings the village with extensive floodplain on ground it calls nearly flat, and the creek doesn’t only rise in summer. High water closed Elk Run Road between Tenerife Road and Sowego Road on November 12, 2020, and the second-highest crest on the Weather Service’s list for the Catlett gauge, 22 feet, came on October 15, 1942. A basement or crawlspace that takes water in the fall often puts it right where the furnace sits.
A furnace that stood in water needs more than a tune-up. Furnace makers print the warning in their own manuals: don’t use one if any part has been under water, because trying to run a flood-damaged furnace can end in a fire or an explosion, and a qualified tech should replace the wet gas controls and electrical parts first. Don’t relight it to see. Call us, and we’ll go through it before it runs. If the water stopped short of the cabinet, a tune-up afterward is still worth it, since damp air rusts burners from below.
Heating is the long season here. NOAA’s Warrenton 3 SE station, the nearest with thirty-year normals, counts about 4,700 heating degree days a year and about 13 days when the high stays at freezing or below. Hurricane Sandy came through on October 29, 2012, just as furnaces were starting their season, and blocked forty roads across southern Fauquier with fallen trees and wires. A propane furnace needs power for its igniter, controls and blower; if the heat doesn’t return with the lights, call us and we’ll check it over.