Furnace tune-ups in Remington.

Out of 858 owner homes in ZIP 22734, about ten heat with natural gas. Roughly three in four use electricity, here mostly a heat pump with electric strips for the bitter hours; about one in ten burns propane; nearly one in ten heats mainly with wood. So a Remington heating tune-up is usually a heat pump tune-up, the same $99 a system, and propane furnaces get theirs at that price too.

Warrenton 3 SE’s thirty-year record, kept ten miles north of town on higher ground, puts the average January low just under 25 degrees and about 98 nights a year at or below freezing. Fauquier County’s code tables set 17 degrees as the winter design temperature, the cold a heating system is sized for, and the station still averages about five nights a year at 10 or colder.

The hard cold comes in spells. The station read 3 degrees in January 2014 and 2 in February 2015, and in late January 2026 the weather service issued Extreme Cold Warnings across the Piedmont. The December 2020 ice storm left up to half an inch at Opal, just down the road. On nights like those a heat pump defrosts again and again and hands the rest to its strips, so its tune-up runs heat mode, the defrost cycle and the strips while October is still mild.

Wood heat is the part people don’t expect. A house that burns wood first often keeps a heat pump or propane furnace for the nights the stove burns down, and a backup that runs a handful of days a winter is the easiest one to forget. Power is the other catch: both need electricity, and storms like the March 2018 windstorm brought down trees and wires all over Fauquier. If the heat comes back wrong after an outage, call us and we’ll check it.