Furnace Maintenance and Tune-Ups in Ypsilanti and Southeast Michigan

The furnace that fails on the first polar vortex night in January was almost always telling on itself in October. A flame sensor reading low microamps. An ignitor with a hairline crack you can see with a flashlight. An inducer motor that whines for a second on startup. A condensate trap on a high-efficiency furnace that is half full of sludge. A pressure switch hose that has gone brittle. None of these stop the furnace in mild weather, and all of them stop it on the night when every heating company in Washtenaw County is running 12 hours behind. A real fall tune-up is how you avoid being that call, and in our experience it is the single best money a Michigan homeowner spends on their furnace.

Temprasure's furnace maintenance is instrument-based. We pull the burners and clean them, because rust flakes and dust on the burner ports cause delayed ignition and the boom that cracks heat exchangers. We clean the flame sensor and measure its microamp signal rather than just wiping it. We check ignitor resistance and look for cracks. We test the inducer, the pressure switch and every limit and rollout switch. We measure gas pressure with a manometer and set it to the nameplate. We record static pressure and temperature rise to confirm the blower is moving enough air. We put a camera or mirror on the heat exchanger and run a combustion analysis on the supply air, looking for carbon monoxide that would mean a breach. On condensing furnaces we flush the condensate trap and check the exterior PVC vent for the pitch and clearance that keep it from icing shut.

Southeast Michigan basements add their own items to the list. Michigan basements in pre-war Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor homes are damp enough to rust burners and corrode flame sensors in a single season. Basements where the dryer, the cat box and the laundry bleach live put chlorides into the combustion air, which attacks heat exchangers. Furnaces in crawlspaces under 1960s ranches collect dust and mouse nests in the blower compartment over the summer. We look at the furnace's environment as part of the tune-up, because a furnace that is slowly being eaten by its own basement needs a different plan than one in a dry utility room.

The tune-up is also where the honest conversation happens. A furnace at 18 years with a sound exchanger and a clean combustion reading is worth maintaining, and we will say so. One with an exchanger showing the first rust-through at the bends is on its last winter, and we will say that too, so a replacement can happen in October on your terms instead of in January on nobody's. Our service agreement bundles the fall furnace visit with a spring AC tune-up, adds priority scheduling when something does break, and discounts repairs. Documented annual maintenance is also what most manufacturers require to keep the parts warranty valid, and the written report we leave you is that documentation.