Furnace replacement in Quantico.

The Census counts 310 occupied homes in the Town of Quantico, 260 of them rented. A furnace here is usually the landlord’s purchase and the tenant’s cold morning. Owners are the small group, about 50 homes with a median build year of 1950. An owner of a duplex or small building can ask for each furnace as its own written line, so the oldest goes first.

Among the Town’s roughly 50 owner homes, the survey shows about six in ten on gas, about a quarter on electricity and nearly two in ten on oil. It is a small sample. A gas furnace is the straight swap here, and a propane house can do the same. We don’t work on oil burners, so an oil house is choosing between a gas or propane furnace and a heat pump.

Houses from before 1940 make up about a quarter of the Town’s stock. A furnace added to a house that old was often vented into a masonry chimney the water heater also uses. A new high-efficiency furnace exhausts through plastic pipe, which leaves the water heater alone in a chimney built for two, and that flue can run too cool to draft well. The tech checks the chimney and writes down whether the water heater needs a fix.

The air station averages 4,002 heating degree days a year, with about 76 nights at or below 32. Late January 2026 is the stretch to remember: Extreme Cold Warnings for the nights of the 27th, 30th and 31st, wind chills between zero and 10 below, and the cold carried into early February. A furnace with a worn blower motor or a weak igniter is the one to replace in October, before the cold arrives.