Heating, cooling and water heater service in Willis, MI

About Willis

Willis sits in the eastern half of Augusta Township where Willis Road crosses Rawsonville Road, and it is an eighteen-minute drive from our shop down Rawsonville Road past the Ford plant and the township line. The hamlet got its name from a railroad stop in the 1800s, and the post office, a small cluster of older homes and a church still gather at the corner. Unlike its neighbor Whittaker a few miles west, Willis leans toward Belleville and Sumpter in its daily life: Rawsonville Road is the main route north to I-94 and the Ford Rawsonville plant, and many residents work there or at the airport-area suppliers. The land around the crossroads is flat farm ground laced with drainage ditches, and Paint Creek runs through the low country to the north. Houses are strung along Bunton, Hitchingham, Tuttle Hill and Willis Roads on parcels of an acre or more, with a handful of newer builds filling in old pasture. It is quiet, unincorporated and unhurried, and people here call us because they want a company that will actually drive out.

What Willis houses need from an HVAC company

The typical Willis house is a 1950s–80s ranch on a crawlspace or a shallow block basement, built by a farm family or an auto worker on a piece of split-off land, and heated by a furnace that has been replaced once or twice without anyone enlarging the ductwork. Many of these were originally on fuel oil, and we still find abandoned oil tanks in basements and oil-to-gas conversion furnaces that are long past their design life. The farmhouses along Bunton and Tuttle Hill Roads are 1870s–1920s two-stories with Michigan basements and a forced-air system threaded in after the fact, usually with cold upstairs bedrooms as the result. Scattered 1990s–2010s acreage homes are colonials and ranches on full basements with 80 or 90 percent furnaces, more often propane than natural gas. Manufactured and modular homes are a larger share of the housing here than in the rest of the county, and their package units and small downflow furnaces are a regular part of our work.

Weather and the equipment it tests

Willis is as flat as anywhere in Washtenaw County, and drainage is slow enough that ditches and field tiles run most of the spring. Crawlspaces near Paint Creek and along the lower stretches of Bunton Road stay wet into June, and that moisture finds its way into ductwork and furnace cabinets. Winter wind crosses the fields unbroken, and summer brings long humid stretches with little shade outside the old farmstead windbreaks.

Local details we plan around

• DTE gas follows Rawsonville Road and Willis Road through the crossroads, but most side roads are propane-only, and we confirm fuel type before quoting any equipment.
• Private wells supply every home, and the water is hard with iron and sometimes sulfur, which eats water heater anodes and leaves sediment that needs flushing.
• All homes are on septic, and high-efficiency furnace condensate needs a neutralizer or a discharge point that does not feed the drain field.
• Abandoned fuel-oil tanks and oil-era chimneys are common in the older ranches, and venting a new gas furnace into one of those chimneys often requires a liner.
• Permits for Willis addresses go through Washtenaw County's building department, and inspections are scheduled on the county's southern-township rotation.
• Spring flooding in crawlspaces near Paint Creek is routine, so we recommend elevating any furnace or water heater that sits below grade.