Stone Ridge is where Aldie’s furnaces are oldest. Its median owner home dates to 2009, so a furnace that came with one of those houses is in its late teens, and the outdoor unit out back may already be on its second round. That’s the house a furnace on its own suits best: the newer air conditioner stays, and if its coil was changed along with it, the coil stays too, set back on top of the new cabinet.
Sizing is where Loudoun’s rules come in. The County wants a gas permit for every furnace swap, and since October 2025 a replacement skips plans review only if it keeps the BTUs and the spot. Builder furnaces were often picked on the big side, so a new one measured to the house as it stands often comes out the same size or smaller, which keeps it a straight replacement. Bigger, or moved, falls outside that exemption.
Then the vent. Some 2000s builder furnaces are the standard-efficiency kind, venting straight up through the roof in metal pipe, sometimes shared with the gas water heater. A high-efficiency replacement vents in plastic, usually out a side wall, and in Stone Ridge that counts as a changed flue. If the water heater shared the old pipe, the written price should say how it vents once the furnace leaves it.
Propane is a small slice of Aldie: about one owner home in twenty across 20105, and closer to one in seventy inside Stone Ridge, so most propane furnaces sit beyond its edges. They get the same job, with the new furnace converted for propane before it’s lit. In the condo buildings, Mercer Park or Stone Mill Corner among them, read the association documents before booking; they say whose furnace it is and may limit where a vent can leave the building.