Heat pump repair in Fairfax Station.

Nearly every owner home in Fairfax Station is a detached house, and eight in ten of them went up in the 1980s and 1990s. So the heat pumps here are on a schedule. A pump from the original build is long gone; the one in your yard now was probably installed somewhere between 2005 and 2015, which is right when the capacitor, contactor and defrost control start to go. When a Fairfax Station neighbor calls about a heat pump that quit in the first cold snap, that’s usually the age we are looking at.

The lots are big and the houses are too, which means the outdoor unit is often far from the thermostat and far from the driveway. Two things follow. A pump tucked against the side of the house under trees collects leaves, pine needles and ice on the coil, and a coil that can’t breathe looks like a broken heat pump when it just needs cleaning. And a two-system house gives you a quick test: when one floor is cold and the other fine, it is one pump, and you can tell us which.

A third of the town heats with electricity, and a fair number of those houses are on septic, with no gas main on the street. For them the heat pump and its strips are the whole heating system, so a dead pump means the strips are running every hour and the electric meter shows it. Where a propane tank sits in the yard, the setup is different: the pump handles the mild days and a propane furnace takes the cold ones, and we check both halves so a dual fuel house isn’t being heated by the wrong one.

Crosspointe and South Run have their own streets and their own HOA habits. If your pump sits where the association asked it to, tell us, and we will work around the screen or fence rather than move anything. A new location is a separate question, and most repairs never need one.