Across 20105 the median owner home went up in 2013, which makes a typical Aldie furnace and air conditioner twelve or thirteen years old. Pairs that age usually earn a repair, not a replacement. Stone Ridge runs older: its median owner home is from 2009, and half its owner homes are older still, so the pairs that came with those houses are the ones reaching their late teens.
From 2010, new R-22 could only be made for equipment built before then, so an original system in a Stone Ridge house finished in 2009 or earlier may still run on it. A new outdoor unit needs a coil to match, and that coil sits on a furnace just as old as the condenser, so on a pair like that, doing both is one install instead of two a few winters apart.
Not every Aldie house has a furnace to replace. About 15 percent of owner homes heat with electricity, which in a house this new usually means a heat pump and an air handler, and there the like-for-like job is a heat pump system, $8,499 to $21,650 installed. Stone Ridge sits nearer 11 percent, so more of the electric houses are outside it. About one owner home in twenty burns propane instead, priced the same way as gas, with the furnace set up for propane.
The townhouses, more than half of Stone Ridge, tuck the furnace into a closet or attic space and set the condenser on a pad a few feet from the neighbor’s. Getting the old pair out and the new one in through the same hatch is part of the quote. In the condo buildings, the association documents say who owns which half.