Boiler repair and replacement in Delaplane.

ZIP 20144 counts 424 owner homes, and not one heats with utility gas. Propane heats about half, electricity about three in ten, and oil fewer than one in ten, so a Delaplane boiler runs on propane from the yard. One that won’t fire may simply be a tank that ran low, so the gauge is the first thing to look at, and the propane company’s number belongs next to ours.

The village sits about 449 feet up beside Goose Creek, inside the Crooked Run Valley Rural Historic District, and its ZIP takes in Sky Meadows State Park. The housing is mostly from the 1980s and 1990s: about half the owner homes went up in those two decades, the typical one in 1986, and about one in five is older than 1980. Nearly every owner home is a detached house, so the boiler usually has a basement or a utility room of its own.

Any fuel-fired appliance is permit work in Fauquier County, so swapping a propane boiler takes one, same spot or not. The Department of Community Development at 16 Courthouse Square in Warrenton issues trade permits over the counter, with no plans and usually no zoning approval. If the boiler quits on a cold night, Virginia’s code lets the replacement go first, provided the application reaches the County’s Building office by the end of the next working day.

Fauquier sizes heating to a winter design temperature of 17 degrees, and the valley gets colder than that feels: in the late January 2026 Arctic outbreak, the Delaplane mesonet logged a 0 degree wind chill. Storms are the other risk. On June 22, 2022, gusts estimated at 80 to 90 mph put large trees onto power lines around Delaplane, Marshall and Ashville.