Leesburg is an incorporated town with its own government and its own permit office, sitting inside Loudoun County as its county seat. If your address is in town, the town inspects your furnace replacement. If you are just outside it, the county does. Worth establishing before anyone quotes you.
The housing splits along roughly the same line, and so does the heating work.
Two kinds of Leesburg house
The historic district and the older streets around it. Houses that predate central heating by a long way, running whatever was retrofitted into them decades later. Tight mechanical spaces, ductwork threaded through closets and chases, venting through masonry, and frequently a ductless head serving a converted attic or an addition where ducts would not go. The constraint on this work is nearly always access rather than the equipment itself.
The subdivisions. Everything built out from the 1980s onward, spreading north and east. Gas furnaces with central air, sealed combustion on the later ones, two systems in the bigger houses, heat pumps across a share of the townhouses. Most of this equipment is in the fifteen to thirty year band now.
Common Heating and Furnace System Failures
It lights, runs a few seconds, shuts off, tries again. Flame sensor. A film of oxide on the rod stops it confirming the flame, so the board shuts the gas. $95 to $180 to clean, and the most common no-heat call we run.
Clicking with no flame. Hot surface igniter, $240 to $410. A wear item rather than a verdict on the furnace.
Runs ten or fifteen minutes and shuts down, comes back later. Overheating on restricted airflow. Filter first, then the blower wheel at $300 to $440.
Nothing at all. Thermostat batteries, the switch on the wall beside the furnace, the breaker. Then a control board at $550 to $1,180, or a clogged condensate trap at $175 to $420 on a high efficiency unit refusing to fire on purpose.
A squeal or grind from the blower. Blower motor, $670 to $2,400 depending on standard or variable speed.
Heat pump iced over and staying that way. Frost on a damp 35 degree day is normal; a block of ice at noon is not, and it is usually the defrost board at $450 to $1,150.
A smell of exhaust, or the carbon monoxide alarm sounds. Turn the furnace off, open windows, leave, call from outside. In a town with housing this old, this is worth taking seriously: Virginia requires carbon monoxide alarms in new construction with fuel burning appliances and has no retrofit rule for existing homes, so a lot of Leesburg’s oldest houses have never had one.
Repair prices
- Diagnostic visit: about $99.
- Flame sensor cleaned $95 to $180; igniter or sensor replaced $240 to $410.
- Condensate drain or trap $175 to $420. Thermostat $300 to $640.
- Blower wheel cleaned $300 to $440. Blower motor $670 to $2,400.
- Control board $550 to $1,180. Inducer motor about $1,950.
- Heat pump defrost board $450 to $1,150.
- Cracked heat exchanger: not a repair at any price. Here is how to know the diagnosis is real.
The full furnace list with symptoms is here.
Replacing in an old house, and the chimney question
If your furnace and water heater share a masonry chimney, and the new furnace is a high efficiency unit venting in PVC out a side wall, the water heater is left alone on a flue sized for two appliances. The fuel gas code requires the chimney to be examined before the new appliance goes in, and when the flue is now oversized, exhaust cools and condenses inside it, eating the mortar and weakening the draft.
The fix is a liner or a power vent water heater. It is a modest number, and it belongs in the quote rather than in a phone call three weeks later. In the historic district this comes up often enough that a quote which does not mention it has not been in the basement.
A furnace alone runs $4,498 to $12,300 installed; a furnace and air conditioner together $8,898 to $23,000 by size. Washington Gas is paying $500 to $700 toward a high efficiency furnace through its contractor network this cycle. If your house is on propane rather than natural gas, which some of the outlying addresses are, the equipment is the same and the fuel conversion is a separate conversation worth having before you buy.
The estimator gives you the installed range for your system size in about two minutes with no phone number.
October list
Run the heat for an hour now. Change the filter. Put a carbon monoxide alarm on each sleeping floor. And if you have never had the venting looked at in an older house, this is the month, because the fix is cheap in October and urgent in January.
SwiftPro repairs heating systems across Leesburg and Loudoun County. Call (703) 997-9757, book online, or see the Leesburg furnace repair page.
