Furnace Repair in Ann Arbor Township, Michigan

Temprasure has fixed a lot of furnaces in Ann Arbor Township, MI that another company said were done. Not because the other company was lying, but because a furnace that will not stay lit looks terrifying to a homeowner and a quick replacement quote is easy to write. We diagnose with a manometer, a meter and a combustion analyzer, inspect the heat exchanger on every Ann Arbor Township call, and tell you exactly what failed. For Washtenaw County homes on DTE Energy gas, that usually means a repair in the low hundreds and a furnace that runs another five winters.

Ann Arbor Township houses and what that means for furnace repair

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.

The 1950s–80s custom homes on large wooded lots, with newer estates along Geddes and Earhart that dominate Ann Arbor Township were often built with a furnace sized for a house with no insulation, single-pane windows and an unfinished basement. Decades of upgrades later, that same furnace, or its like-for-like replacement from the 1990s, is badly oversized, and oversized furnaces short cycle. Every short cycle stresses the ignitor and the heat exchanger, and that is why so many Ann Arbor Township repair calls from Dixboro Road corridor involve a cracked ignitor on a furnace that is otherwise healthy. We fix the ignitor, but we also check the temperature rise and the blower speed, because sometimes a simple adjustment gets a furnace cycling properly and makes the next ignitor last twice as long.

Heating calls from Ann Arbor 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 18 minutes away with ignitors, flame sensors, pressure switches and inducer motors on the truck. The 1950s–80s custom homes on large wooded lots, with newer estates along Geddes and Earhart around Huron River Drive and Joy Road area mostly burn DTE Energy along the main roads natural gas, and the furnaces in them are old enough that a heat exchanger inspection is part of every visit, not an upsell. Near Marshall Nature Area and out toward Dixboro 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 Ann Arbor Township

• DTE gas runs along the main corridors, but a surprising number of estates on Huron River Drive, Geddes and the northern roads heat with propane, and some have large buried tanks.
• Homes with multiple furnaces and air handlers in different wings mean a single thermostat complaint often turns out to be a zoning or balancing problem rather than an equipment failure.
• Long, tree-lined private drives make power outages frequent, and we field a steady stream of questions about generator transfer wiring for furnaces.
• 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.