Furnace Installation & Replacement in Ann Arbor, Michigan

A furnace replacement in Ann Arbor is a 20-year decision made in a basement, usually under some time pressure because the old one quit in January. Temprasure tries to take the pressure off. If you are without heat, we can set temporary heat and get equipment quickly. If you have time, we walk the house, run the load calculation, look at the chimney, the gas line and the condensate situation, and give you two or three options in writing with one flat price each. Ann Arbor, MI is well inside our radius, the owner does the install, and the Washtenaw County inspection is part of the job.

Ann Arbor houses and what that means for furnace installation

Ann Arbor gives us almost every housing type in one zip code. The Old West Side and Old Fourth Ward are full of 1880s–1920s frame houses with stone or rubble foundations, fieldstone basements that stay damp, and furnaces that replaced boilers or gravity units sometime in the 1960s or 70s. Many of those homes still have cast-iron radiators fed by a boiler, and a surprising number have both a boiler and a separate forced-air system added for cooling. Burns Park and Ann Arbor Hills houses are larger 1920s–50s builds with plaster walls, so getting a second return or a bigger supply trunk in is slow work. The ranches and split-levels of the west side were built with 80,000 to 100,000 BTU furnaces that are now oversized for insulated versions of the same house. Condos near Briarwood and Pittsfield Village often have furnaces in closets or attics with tight clearances. Student rentals near campus run the oldest equipment in the city, and landlords routinely call us for emergency service and new-purchase inspections.

Chimneys decide a lot of furnace replacements in Ann Arbor. The pre-war two-stories and 1950s–60s ranches, with university-era infill on every side around Eberwhite were built with a masonry chimney that served both the furnace and the water heater, and when a homeowner switches to a 96 percent condensing furnace that vents out the side wall in PVC, the water heater is left alone in a flue far too large for it. The exhaust cools, condenses on the brick, and in bad cases backdrafts into the basement. On every Ann Arbor, MI estimate where a high-efficiency furnace is on the table, we look at the chimney and price a properly sized liner or a power-vent solution for the water heater as part of the job, so the upgrade does not create a new problem.

A no-heat call from 48103 gets priority in winter, and the drive from Ypsilanti to Ann Arbor is about 16 minutes. The houses here, from the pre-war two-stories and 1950s–60s ranches, with university-era infill on every side around Water Hill and Eberwhite to the newer builds near Burns Park, run almost entirely on DTE Energy, and the failures we see are the same ones we see everywhere in Southeast Michigan: dirty flame sensors, failed hot-surface ignitors, stuck pressure switches, cracked exchangers on furnaces that should have been retired. We diagnose with a combustion analyzer and a manometer, not a flashlight, and we show you the reading before we quote the repair.

Local details we plan around in Ann Arbor

• A lot of pre-1950 houses have been converted to duplexes or student rentals, which means two systems crammed into one basement and undersized gas lines serving both.
• The city's water is treated at its own plant and softened, so water heater sediment is lighter here than in surrounding townships on well water.
• Fieldstone foundations in the oldest neighborhoods sweat enough that furnace cabinets and water heater bases corrode early unless they sit on blocks or a pad.
• The Huron River cuts a deep valley through the north side of Ann Arbor, and the Northside, Lower Town and Gallup Park neighborhoods feel it as morning fog, heavier dew and basements that sweat in July. The downtown core holds heat with all its brick and pavement, so attics and upper floors there run several degrees hotter than the leafy blocks of Burns Park and the Old West Side, where mature oaks and maples shade roofs and cut peak cooling loads noticeably.