For cold-weather records Triangle leans on the Marine Corps air station at Quantico, 3.8 miles south-southeast at the Potomac’s edge, a hundred feet below Triangle’s middle. Its 1991 to 2020 normals count 4,002 heating degree days a year, two and a half times its cooling degree days, and about 76 freezing nights. In half of years the first 32 degree night comes by November 8, the date to beat: a dirty flame sensor limps through October and quits on the first hard night.
About three Triangle owners in four burn natural gas. Electric heat, usually a heat pump, covers about one owner in five, and a heat pump tune-up is the same $99 a system. Propane is rare, about 40 owner homes across 22172, and a propane furnace gets its pressure checked against propane’s numbers, not natural gas’s.
Snow tests the venting. The January 2016 blizzard left 18.5 inches near Dumfries, a mile and a half north, and the January 2025 storm ended with 45 mph gusts and blowing snow. In the 2004 plats, Garrison Woods, Moncure Woods and The Reserve at Potomac Crest, a builder furnace breathing through plastic pipes low on a side wall shuts down when a drift covers them. The County’s fire and rescue department wants furnace vents kept clear during and after a snowstorm, and the tune-up proves the switch that stops the burners when those pipes block still works.
Graham Park heats differently. Its first plat dates to 1950, Nob Hill and Graham Park Shores followed in the 1960s, and a furnace there is usually a replacement, sometimes the third. Where it shares a chimney with a gas water heater, the tune-up watches the draft and the safeties through a whole cycle. If ice like February 2021’s quarter inch near I-95 brings lines down, a gas furnace goes cold too, since it needs power to light; a generator belongs outdoors, the County’s fire department says, more than 20 feet from any window.