Furnace replacement in Bluemont.

Gas and propane furnaces are a minority here. In ZIP 20135, about 14 percent of owner homes burn propane and about 3 percent natural gas, while 54 percent heat with electricity, 24 percent with wood or another fuel and 4 percent with oil. So a furnace swap in Bluemont is most often a propane job, on a fuel that needs its own setup. We do not work on oil furnaces; if oil is your fuel, a switch to propane or a heat pump is ours to price, and the furnace alone runs $4,285 to $14,040.

The county line decides the paperwork. Loudoun County requires a permit to swap a gas furnace, and since October 2025 a replacement that keeps the same BTUs in the same spot needs no plans. In Clarke County, Virginia’s building code lets an appliance be replaced without a permit only when it is not fueled by gas or oil, so a gas or propane swap there is permit work, handled by the Building Department at 101 Chalmers Court in Berryville. By Census block count, 68.5 percent of the ZIP’s housing units are on the Clarke side.

The rating plate gives your furnace’s year, and in houses of this vintage the ducts can be older than the furnace. The median owner home dates from 1981, about 37 percent were built from 1980 through 1999, and about one in three predate 1960. Loudoun County Fire and Rescue says to keep anything that can burn at least three feet from all heating equipment, worth measuring in a basement or closet before a larger unit goes in. If the air conditioner is tired too, the pair together is $8,898 to $23,000.

Size it to the slope. Mount Weather totals 5,302 heating degree days and Purcellville 4,942, with January lows averaging 22.3 and 24.5 degrees. The village sits closer to the valley’s elevation, but houses up the mountain run the ridge’s numbers. A furnace sized to the house as it stands beats one sized to the old nameplate. And when outages come, as they did across Loudoun County in February 2010, even a propane furnace needs the grid to run its blower.