Fairfax County’s dwelling records list central air on 5,822 of the 5,906 houses in 22066, and the middle one has about 3,700 square feet above ground before the basement counts. A house that size splits its cooling: one system for the basement and main floor, another for the bedrooms, sometimes a third for an addition. Each has its own condenser, its own coil and its own birthday. So the price here is per system, and the honest answer is often to replace the one that quit and put a date on the next.
An AC on its own is the job where a furnace sits under the coil. A little under half the owner homes here burn natural gas and about one in twelve burn propane from a tank in the yard; either way the furnace stays and only the cooling side changes. About four in ten heat with electricity, usually through a heat pump, which gets replaced as a heat pump at $8,499 to $21,650 installed. About one in eighteen heat with oil. We don’t work on oil burners, so an oil house is a switch, priced as a heat pump system.
The typical owner’s house here dates from 1986, so the air conditioner out back now is often its second or third. If that one went in during the 2000s, it’s around twenty and most likely holds R-22, out of production since 2020, so every recharge draws down a shrinking supply. The houses built in the 2000s themselves, about one in nine here, may still cool with the builder’s units. Federal energy planners figure a central AC in Virginia lasts about 18 years, and a lot of Great Falls condensers have already outlived that.
The bedroom system is the tricky swap. By the county’s records 75 percent of houses here are two stories, and that system’s coil usually sits in the attic on an air handler or furnace. The new coil comes up through the hatch or the pull-down stair, rides over a pan with a float switch that shuts the cooling off if the drain backs up, and needs its drain routed away from the ceiling below. Downstairs, with a rec room in 83 percent of basements, the coil on the basement furnace often drains through a small pump. Ask to see both on the written quote.