About one home in seven in 20115 went up before 1940. In the old village, Fauquier County’s plan lists stone, frame and brick buildings on West Main Street from the early 1800s, a National Register historic district of 139 properties, and about twenty houses on Anderson Avenue from the 1920s to the mid 1940s, mostly story-and-a-half frame. All of it went up long before central air was common. Where ducts were never squeezed in, a mini split heats and cools room by room through a slim line set.
The I-houses on Main Street are the easy ones. Two stories tall and one room deep, nearly every room has an outside wall, which is where a head and its refrigerant lines want to be: a short run through the wall, down the outside under a cover, to an outdoor unit set behind the house. A head in each of the two upstairs bedrooms, on one outdoor unit, is two zones, $11,000 to $15,000 installed.
North of Main Street the plan describes Marshall’s newer, more suburban side: houses from the 1960s through the 1990s with larger garages and wider driveways. The room over one of those garages, or a garage made into a family room, is the usual space the original ductwork doesn’t serve. Basements are the other: parts of Marshall sit on soils the plan maps with a seasonal high water table 10 to 40 inches down, so a finished basement here can run cool and damp, and a head gives it a setting of its own.
About eight homes in ten across the ZIP are detached houses, and out on the farms and big lots a mini split often goes where no duct ever will: a guest cottage, an office in an outbuilding, a room added off the back.