Furnace Maintenance & Tune-Ups in Salem Township, Michigan

Nobody in Salem Township wants to spend a January night at 52 degrees waiting on a parts run, and a fall tune-up from Temprasure is the cheapest way to avoid it. We find the flame sensor that would have failed in February, the ignitor with the hairline crack, the condensate trap on the 96 percent furnace near Salem Hills Golf Club that would have frozen on the first minus-10 night. Salem Township, MI is well inside our 20-mile radius, DTE Energy customers there get the same flat rate as our neighbors in Ypsilanti, and service-agreement members get first choice of fall dates.

Salem Township houses and what that means for furnace maintenance

Salem's houses are nearly all custom or owner-built rather than tract, and they are spread thin, so our calls here are long drives between very different problems. The 1850s–1920s farmhouses in and around the village have Michigan basements, rough stone walls and ductwork added in the 1960s or later, often with a furnace that is serving an addition it was never sized for. The 1970s–90s ranches and split-levels along Currie, Tower and Angle Roads sit on crawlspaces or walkout basements and frequently started life on fuel oil or propane. The 1995–2015 estate homes near Napier Road and along North Territorial are large two-stories with two or more furnaces, zoned systems and finished walkouts, commonly on propane with a buried tank. Many properties have a heated barn, workshop or pole building with its own unit heater. Older homes with converted oil furnaces and unlined chimneys are the most frequent safety finding we make here.

Damp basements are the maintenance story in Salem Township. The older 1970s–2000s acreage homes and estate builds with century-old farmhouses between them near North Territorial Road corridor sit on Michigan basements or block foundations that sweat all summer, and by October the burners on an 80 percent furnace are coated in rust, the flame sensor is corroded and the bottom of the heat exchanger has been sitting in humid air for five months. Our fall tune-up for these Salem Township, MI homes starts with the burner assembly and the exchanger because that is where the damage shows up first. We clean what can be cleaned, measure what can be measured, and tell you when the basement is winning so you can plan a replacement or a dehumidifier instead of being surprised by a CO reading.

Heating calls from Salem Township come in two waves: the first real cold night in November and whatever stretch of January the polar vortex decides to visit. Both times we are 24 minutes away with ignitors, flame sensors, pressure switches and inducer motors on the truck. The 1970s–2000s acreage homes and estate builds with century-old farmhouses between them around the village of Salem and Gotfredson Road south end mostly burn DTE Energy natural gas, and the furnaces in them are old enough that a heat exchanger inspection is part of every visit, not an upsell. Near Salem Township Hall on Six Mile Road and out toward Seven Mile Road corridor, we also see high-efficiency furnaces whose exterior vents ice over in a storm, which looks like a dead furnace and is a ten-minute fix.

Local details we plan around in Salem Township

• Older farmhouses and 1970s ranches that were converted from fuel oil often still have the original oil chimney, and lining it is a standard part of any gas furnace replacement.
• Mechanical permits go through Washtenaw County, and the county inspector's northern rotation can add a few days to an inspection schedule.
• Septic systems serve the entire township, and condensate from high-efficiency furnaces needs to be neutralized or kept out of the septic line.
• Salem is higher and more rolling than the townships along the Huron, and it is exposed to wind from every direction across open fields, with winter gusts that make the northwest corner of any house the cold corner. Snowfall runs slightly heavier here than in Ypsilanti because of the elevation and the distance from the river valley. Woodlots and the Johnson Creek drain hold summer humidity in the low spots, while the higher ground stays drier.