Furnace and AC replacement in Remington.

Remington’s houses came in two booms with a lull between. ZIP 22734 has 287 homes from before 1940 and 213 from the 1950s, only about 120 from the 1960s and 1970s together, then 377 from the 1980s, the ZIP’s busiest building decade, and about 200 apiece from the 1990s and 2000s. A 1980s house is past its first system and often its second; a 2000s house may still have the builder’s pair, now around twenty.

Only some of those houses take this job. Electricity heats 639 of the 858 owner homes, and those mostly go to a heat pump and air handler instead, at $8,499 to $21,650. The furnace and AC pair is a job for the 92 owner homes on bottled or tank gas and the handful on a gas line, where the cooling coil rides on the furnace cabinet. When both halves share a birth year, one visit covers the matched coil, the propane conversion and the thermostat wiring.

Summer gets its say too. The NOAA normals from Warrenton 3 SE show roughly 21 days of 90 degrees or more in a normal summer, and NOAA logged heat indices past 115 for Southern Fauquier in July 2011. Winter still runs longer, about 98 freezing nights in an average year. So each half is sized on its own math: the furnace for Fauquier County’s 17 degree winter design night, the cooling for the heat the house picks up on a July afternoon.

Low ground decides where the outdoor half sits. When the Rappahannock at the Remington gauge passes 20 feet, the Weather Service expects water at a few homes south of town; in June 2018 it reached 23.1, and NOAA logged backwater flooding up Tinpot Run earlier that month. A new condenser can go on a raised stand or to higher ground, and moving it means a County permit.