Heat pumps warm most of Remington, which makes a furnace the exception here, and nearly always a propane one. Of the 858 owner homes in ZIP 22734, the Census counts 92 heating with bottled or tank gas and just 10 piped into a natural gas line. A new furnace ships ready for natural gas, so it’s converted to propane right there in the basement or closet, and the joint between the tank’s line and the furnace is pressure tested before the burners ever light.
Heating is the long season here. The closest NOAA climate normals come from Warrenton 3 SE, ten miles north-northeast and a bit higher up, and they put heating at about 4,685 degree days a year against 1,018 for cooling, better than four to one. Fauquier County’s code tables call for designing to 17 degrees in winter, the night a furnace is sized to carry, and real winters dip under it: that station read 3 degrees on January 7, 2014.
Where the furnace lives depends on the house. Downtown’s Queen Anne, Victorian and I-plan houses went up long before forced air was common, so the furnace in such a house tends to sit in a cellar or a closet, on ductwork added later, and its replacement has to come down the same tight stairs. In a newer house the propane furnace may be the backup half of a dual fuel system, firing only in hard cold. Few run hours don’t make it young: a 2005 furnace has a twenty-year-old heat exchanger.
Downtown also floods. Fauquier County’s plan names the Rappahannock and Tinpot Run as the reason part of downtown goes under at times, and at the river gauge in Remington the Weather Service expects parts of downtown near the railroad tracks to flood at 25 feet. In June 2018 the river crested at 23.1 feet, and NOAA’s storm log records water in a couple of homes. A cellar furnace that took water is a safety question before it’s a comfort one.