The nearest long-term weather record is the Marine Corps air station’s, 1.6 miles south-southwest of the Town on the same shoreline. Its 1991 to 2020 normals put a July afternoon at 88 degrees and roughly 30 afternoons a year at 90 or more. The figure that matters more to an air conditioner is the July night, which averages close to 71. With no cool night to rest in, the outdoor unit keeps running into the evening for weeks, and the parts that wear with running time, the capacitor, the contactor and the fan motor, wear faster.
Prince William County’s address records date at least nine of the 13 homes on 5th Avenue to before 1940, and two houses on 3rd Avenue to 1918. Nobody built for central air then. When it came, decades later, the ducts went wherever a carpenter could fit them, often across the attic over the top floor, with one return doing the work of several. A Town house that cools the downstairs and bakes the bedrooms usually has an air path problem, so we measure the airflow before anybody talks refrigerant.
Most Town homes are rented: 281 of the 323 occupied ones at the 2020 Census. Potomac Avenue alone has 45 apartment addresses in the County’s records, and in buildings like those the cooling usually belongs to the owner. If you rent, tell your landlord first; if the owner books us, the price goes to them in writing. Base housing is separate. Liberty Military Housing owns and maintains the family homes aboard Marine Corps Base Quantico, so a dead air conditioner there goes to Liberty or the base Family Housing Office, not to us.
Storms hit this stretch of the river hard. NOAA’s Storm Events database logs a 66 mph gust at the air station in the June 29, 2012 derecho, on an afternoon when heat indexes there already ran 110 to 114, and a tornado the station’s weather observer saw over wooded base land near Brown Field on April 27, 2011. In August 2021 a thunderstorm dropped a tree on Fuller Road, the Town’s way out to Route 1. Once a storm passes, walk out to the condenser before you switch the cooling on again: limbs in the fan, a crushed grille, the disconnect box hanging loose. If anything looks wrong, leave its breaker off and call us.