Furnace and heating repair in Triangle.

The Quantico air station’s records, under four miles off, put the average January low near 28 degrees, with about 76 nights a year at or below freezing. In half of all years the first one arrives by November 8 and the last by March 28. Nights at 10 or colder come fewer than twice a year, so a long cold stretch finds a furnace’s weak part.

Late January 2026 was that stretch: Extreme Cold Warnings on the nights of January 27, 30 and 31, wind chills of zero to 10 below between the Piedmont and I-95, and cold that held into February. A week of nearly nonstop running shows what was about to go: an igniter with a hairline crack, a blower motor running hot, a sticky pressure switch.

Roughly a fifth of Triangle’s owner homes heat with electricity, usually a heat pump. On February 13 and 14, 2021, freezing rain and sleet built ice to about a quarter inch near and east of I-95, Route 1’s side of Triangle. Freezing rain can glaze a heat pump’s coil faster than its defrost cycle clears it. If it’s sealed in ice, switch to emergency heat and call; chipping it off bends fins and can puncture a refrigerant line.

The oldest gas furnaces sit in 1940s and 1950s houses, the first Graham Park sections, Carborough Heights and Mockingbird Heights among them, often venting up one brick chimney with the water heater. Swap either for a high-efficiency unit that vents out the side wall and the chimney is oversized for the one left, so it may need a liner.