Inside the Town of Dumfries about half the owner homes heat with electricity, four in ten with natural gas, and a little over one in twenty with propane. That propane share is several times Montclair’s, where it’s under one home in a hundred. A propane furnace is built like a natural gas one, set up with smaller burner orifices and its own regulator setting, so it fails in the same places: the flame sensor, the igniter, the inducer. The Town’s utility list names two gas companies, Columbia Gas and Washington Gas, and your bill says which one is yours.
Past the town line the furnaces get younger. Cherry Hill, its median owner home built in 2005, heats with gas in about seven homes in ten, and a high-efficiency furnace from those years vents out a side wall in white plastic pipe and makes water as it burns. That water drains to a pump or a floor drain, and when the line slows, a pressure switch stops the burners. On a furnace that age it’s often the reason for a no-heat call.
The site-built houses run older than the county streets around them. About four in ten Town homes went up before 1980 and about one in ten before 1960, on streets like Tripoli Heights and Whitehaven, where a gas furnace often shares a chimney with the water heater. The townhouse rows, Williamstown and Port O’Dumfries among them, were built from 1974 into the early 1990s, so most of those furnaces and air handlers are second or third generation, right where a control board or a blower motor brings up the repair or replace question.
Rent a house out inside the Town and the heat is Town Hall’s business too. The Town runs a rental inspection program in its rental districts, where a rental needs a Town certificate it gets by passing an inspection, and the property maintenance code its inspectors work from covers heating along with smoke detectors.