Boiler repair and replacement in Haymarket.

Inside the Town of Haymarket the typical owner’s house went up in 1995 and only about four in a hundred are older than 1980, so most heat with furnaces and ducts; gas heats a little over six in ten. Across the wider 20169 ZIP, Dominion Valley, Piedmont and Bull Run Mountain Estates, the typical house is from 2006, which makes a boiler rarer still.

The Town has been under historic district zoning since 1994, and its Architectural Review Board issues a Certificate of Appropriateness before any alteration visible from the street. Routine interior work that doesn’t change the look is exempt, so a cast iron boiler kept on its chimney stays out of review, while a condensing boiler’s plastic vent through a street-facing wall needs the certificate first. Interior work, like a boiler swapped in the same basement spot on the same chimney, is the exempt kind.

Since January 15, 2018 the Town has had no building department: Prince William County handles mechanical and plumbing permits inside the Town limits, after the Town’s own Zoning Approval. Outside the limits there’s no separate Zoning Approval step, so the same boiler swap takes one approval fewer on the county side. For a boiler, that’s two sign-offs inside the Town and one outside it.

About one in three owner homes in the Town is a townhouse, and in a townhouse the boiler shares a tight utility room, where a wall-hung combi at $12,782 to $16,500 installed often fits better than a floor-standing boiler. Wherever it sits, the expansion tank is the part that most often drags system pressure up toward the relief valve. Fewer than one in ten homes in the Town is rented, so most boiler decisions here are the owner’s own.