Haymarket mail covers about 9,500 homes, and the Census puts close to half of them in the years 2000 to 2009. Builders of that decade set the furnace and the air conditioner the same week, so in Dominion Valley and Piedmont the two halves share a birthday. An outdoor unit made before 2010 may still run on R-22, which nobody has produced since 2020, and a leak on one of those is often what forces the conversation about the furnace beside it.
The Town runs about a decade older, with a 1995 median and about six in ten homes from the 1980s and 90s; Longstreet Commons, a subdivision the Town dates to 1987, is typical. A house from those years is seldom on its first system, so the question is when the current pair went in. If both halves came from one install more than fifteen years ago, they belong on one quote.
Inside the town limits the outdoor unit’s spot is part of the job. The Town wants heating and AC units out of public view, and its guidelines spell out how: planting used as the screen has to screen all year, so a hedge that drops its leaves in November doesn’t count, and a fence is its own review: wood or wood-look picket, board or split rail, or wrought iron, other styles case by case, never exposed chain link.
About three homes in four across 20169 are single-family houses, and the larger 2000s ones often carry two systems, one for the main floors and one for the bedrooms, each priced on its own. Inside the town, close to four owner homes in ten heat with electricity; where yours has an air handler instead of a furnace, the matching swap is a heat pump system, $8,499 to $21,650 installed.