Heat pump repair in The Plains.

The whole Town of The Plains sits inside its Historic District, and the National Register nomination dates nearly half the buildings to 1900 through 1930. Nobody built those houses for a heat pump. Someone added one later, and it shows. The indoor unit went wherever there was a closet, an attic or a cellar corner, and the line set runs up an outside wall or through a porch ceiling.

Across ZIP 20198, the Town included, the Census puts electric heat, heat pumps among it, in about six owner homes in ten. Three in ten homes predate 1960, and a third of households rent, so the person calling us is sometimes a landlord with a tenant freezing in a century-old house. In those homes the fix is rarely the outdoor unit. It’s the long run of refrigerant line, the old wiring feeding the breaker and the awkward air handler.

The Town’s rules matter for how we repair. Improvements in the Historic District need the Architectural Review Board’s approval, so moving or screening an outdoor unit is a conversation with the Town Clerk first. A like-for-like repair of the unit already there is a different thing, and we’ll keep the work to what’s already in place unless you want to change it.

Wind and trees hit this part of Fauquier. NOAA’s log has dozens of trees and wires down along Halfway Road and The Plains Road in August 2023. A pump that doesn’t restart after a power outage is a common call out here. Try the thermostat and the breaker once, then call us. Repeated resets can cook a capacitor that was already weak.