Freezing nights come early here. At the Purcellville weather station, the nearest with long records at Middleburg’s elevation, the median first freeze of fall lands on October 25 and the last of spring on April 16, with about 115 nights a year at or below 32 degrees. That’s close to half the year on heat, and for every one of those hours the blower is drawing the house’s air in through the return grilles.
Electricity heats 63 percent of the owner homes in 20117, and in a house here that’s most often a heat pump. A heat pump warms the house in long, steady runs rather than a furnace’s short hot ones, so its blower logs more hours. On the coldest mornings, like January 23, 2025, when a weather station in Middleburg read 4 below zero, it also brings on its backup heat strips, bare resistance coils mounted where all the air passes over them.
About one home in four in the ZIP went up in 1939 or earlier, decades before central air, and where those got ducts later, the installer threaded them wherever the framing allowed. Returns in a house like that are often few and small, and some pull straight from a wall cavity, a cellar corner or a crawlspace instead of a sealed duct. You see the camera photos before you see a price, and in an old house they often settle the question.
The newer houses, about a quarter of the ZIP built since 2000 and most of them detached, usually send the upstairs runs through the attic in flex. On July 28, 2023, weather stations across western Loudoun logged heat indices past 110 degrees, and an attic runs far hotter than that. A flex run slipped off its collar cools the attic instead of the bedroom.