The Town of Haymarket hasn’t had a building department since January 15, 2018. Prince William County issues every trade permit inside the town limits now, a water heater’s included, but the Town is plain that its own Zoning Approval comes first: the request form goes to the Town’s Zoning Administrator, and only after that does the County application go in. Outside the town, in Dominion Valley, Piedmont or up on the mountain, it’s the County alone. On either side, swapping a gas tank takes a permit even when the new one matches, and trading an electric tank for an identical-size one in the same place takes none.
The tanks come in three ages. The Town’s median owner home was built in 1995, and close to six in ten of its homes went up in the 1980s and 90s, so the heater in one of those houses is usually its second or third. Across all of 20169 the median is 2006 and nearly half the homes date from the 2000s. In a Dominion Valley or Piedmont house from that decade, the tank may still be the one the builder set, and at close to twenty years it’s running on borrowed time.
Bull Run Mountain Estates is the outlier. Its median house is from 1978, oil and electricity each heat about four in ten of them, and propane about one in eight. A propane water heater sits on the same price row as a gas one, and an electric tank swapped in place needs no County permit. The water is the harder part, literally: Prince William Water rates its Bull Run Mountain and Evergreen wells hard, 7 to 10.5 grains a gallon, and a private well carries whatever the ground puts in it, so a tank up there collects sediment faster than one in town.
Going tankless inside the town brings in one more office. The whole town has been a historic district since 1994, and its Architectural Review Board looks at changes the public can see before they’re made. A tank that goes back on its old flue changes nothing outside. A tankless that exhausts through a new hole in a wall facing the street does, so where the exhaust leaves the house is worth deciding early, while you can still choose a unit to fit it.