Furnace and AC replacement in Bealeton.

Half of Bealeton’s owner homes are older than 1996 and half are newer, the Census says. A house from the 1980s or early 1990s has had more than thirty summers, so its first furnace and air conditioner are long gone and the pair it has now is usually its second. The 423 homes built from 2000 to 2009 are the ones to watch: where the builder’s pair is still running, both halves are now seventeen to twenty-six years old.

A furnace with an air conditioner is the Bealeton setup only where the house burns propane or natural gas, about one owner home in five; the electric houses, about seven in ten, swap in a heat pump system instead. The pair gets more common past the service district: across all of ZIP 22712, propane heats 568 of the 2,469 owner homes.

In a propane house, replacing both at once settles everything on one visit. The outdoor unit gets its matching coil, the furnace under that coil is new too, and the fuel side gets done once: the furnace converted to propane, the gas line leak tested, the thermostat wired for the pair.

The oldest houses in Bealeton need the most measuring. The Census counts about ninety homes in the Census place from before 1940, from the decades when the village grew up around its railroad depot. Where a house that old has ducts, they were often added well after it was built and sized for heat alone, so the cooling half has to be sized to what they can carry.