Furnace Installation & Replacement in Ann Arbor Township, Michigan

Temprasure installs gas furnaces throughout Ann Arbor Township, and the question we get most often is whether a high-efficiency 96 percent unit is worth it over an 80. The honest answer depends on the house. In the 1950s–80s custom homes on large wooded lots, with newer estates along Geddes and Earhart common around Joy Road area, a condensing furnace saves real money on DTE Energy gas across a 6,000-degree-day winter, but it also needs a side-wall PVC vent and may leave the water heater alone on an oversized chimney. We sort all of that out on a free estimate at your Ann Arbor Township home before you decide, and we tell you plainly which option we would put in our own house.

Ann Arbor Township houses and what that means for furnace installation

Almost nothing in Ann Arbor Township is a tract house, which means every service call is a little different. Barton Hills is 1920s–60s architect-designed homes, some with original boilers and radiators, others with forced air that was threaded through later, and many with both plus a separate attic air handler for the upper floors. The Geddes Road and Huron River Drive estates are 1950s–80s customs and 1990s–2010s rebuilds on walkout basements facing the river, frequently with three or four separate systems serving different wings. Along Earhart, Warren and Joy Roads, the township has 1960s–80s ranches and contemporaries on wooded lots, often with a furnace in a crawlspace or garage utility room and ductwork running through unconditioned space. Older farmhouses on Pontiac Trail and Whitmore Lake Road have Michigan basements and a chain of additions. Oversized equipment is common here because builders of large custom homes rarely bothered with a proper load calculation.

Gas service and electrical both get checked on a Ann Arbor Township furnace replacement. Older homes near Joy Road area occasionally have a gas line that was sized for a furnace and a range in the 1950s and has since picked up a water heater, a dryer and a grill, and a new furnace at the end of that run can be starved on a cold night when everything fires at once. On the electrical side, a modern furnace with an ECM blower wants a clean dedicated circuit, and we see shared circuits and ungrounded outlets at the furnace in Ann Arbor Township, MI basements more often than you would expect. Both get evaluated on the estimate and quoted up front if they need correction.

We run a lot of winter miles in Ann Arbor Township, and most of them end in a basement under one of the 1950s–80s custom homes on large wooded lots, with newer estates along Geddes and Earhart that make up its streets near Dixboro Road corridor, Plymouth Road corridor and Geddes Road estates. DTE Energy along the main roads service reaches nearly every home here, so the equipment is familiar: 80 percent and 90-plus percent gas furnaces, a few boilers near Marshall Nature Area, and the occasional propane furnace at the rural edge. What differs house to house is the ductwork and the wiring, and that is where a careful technician earns the dispatch fee. We arrive from Ypsilanti in about 18 minutes, any hour, at the same flat rate.

Local details we plan around in Ann Arbor Township

• Long, tree-lined private drives make power outages frequent, and we field a steady stream of questions about generator transfer wiring for furnaces.
• Mechanical permits for township addresses are handled by Washtenaw County, not the City of Ann Arbor, despite the shared mailing address.
• Nearly all of the township is on private wells, and the water around the river bluffs runs hard with enough iron and sulfur to shorten water heater life.
• The Huron River and Barton Pond dominate the township's weather at ground level: homes on the bluffs and along Huron River Drive deal with fog, heavy dew and basement humidity that the city's higher ground does not. Thick oak and hickory cover across Barton Hills and the Geddes estates keeps summer cooling loads modest but drops leaves and branches on condensers every fall. North of M-14, the land opens into fields and takes the full winter wind.