Gas is the Ashburn default: more than four in five owner homes heat with it, and in Broadlands and Belmont about nine in ten. Those two went up around 2004 and 2005, so a builder’s furnace still running there is close to twenty, the far end of what most gas furnaces give. The outdoor unit beside it has had the rougher life, out through every July heat wave and January freeze, and it’s usually the half that quits first. So by the time the furnace is done, the air conditioner may already be a second one with years left.
Keeping that air conditioner means the new furnace has to suit it. The cooling coil usually sits right on top of the furnace cabinet, so the new cabinet has to meet the coil’s width, and its blower has to move the air that coil was matched for. Read the outdoor unit’s label first. Made in roughly the last ten years, it’s usually worth keeping. If it says R-22, it almost certainly predates 2010, and it’s next in line.
Ashburn Farm and Ashburn Village sit a generation earlier: the typical owner’s house there dates from 1998, and about half the homes went up from 1980 through 1999. Most builder furnaces there are long gone, and the furnace and air conditioner are often different ages by now. That’s the case for pricing only the one that’s done, with the $8,898 to $23,000 range for the pair beside it.
Close to four in ten Ashburn homes are townhouses, more than half in Loudoun Valley Estates, and there the furnace is often up in the attic or a top-floor closet. In the attic, a high-efficiency model’s condensate line needs protecting from a hard freeze, and the new furnace has to come up through the same hatch the old one goes down.