Furnace Repair in Dexter, Michigan

Temprasure has fixed a lot of furnaces in Dexter, 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 Dexter 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.

Dexter houses and what that means for furnace repair

In the historic core around Grand Street, Fifth Street and Broad Street, we work on 1840s–1910s frame and brick homes with fieldstone basements, low ceilings and ductwork that has been reworked three or four times. Some of these still have radiators on a boiler and a separate air handler for cooling tucked into an attic. The subdivisions that make up most of Dexter's housing were built between roughly 1994 and 2008. Huron Farms and Dexter Crossing are two-story colonials and cape-style homes on full poured basements, usually with an original 80 percent furnace, a 10 to 12 SEER condenser, and a water heater that has already been replaced once. Westridge and the newer phases carry 90-plus furnaces and two-stage equipment. Beyond the city line, Mast Road, Island Lake Road and North Territorial have 1970s–90s custom homes and older farmhouses on well, septic and sometimes propane, with walkout basements that bring their own moisture issues.

High-efficiency furnaces in Dexter have a winter problem that 80 percent units never did: they make water. A 90-plus percent furnace condenses several gallons a day out of its exhaust, and that condensate has to drain through a trap, a line and usually a pump to get out of the basement. In the Dexter, MI homes near Monument Park where that line runs through an unheated corner or out through a wall, it freezes during a cold snap, the pressure switch opens, and the furnace shuts down on the coldest night of the year. The exterior PVC vent can ice over the same way. We thaw it, clear it and then fix the routing or pitch so it does not happen again in February.

A no-heat call from 48130 gets priority in winter, and the drive from Ypsilanti to Dexter is about 32 minutes. The houses here, from the 1990s–2000s subdivision homes around an 1830s village core around Island Lake Road area and Baker Road corridor to the newer builds near Huron Farms, 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 Dexter

• Many of the 1990s subdivision homes have a furnace and water heater sharing an undersized masonry chimney that needs a liner when either appliance is upgraded.
• The Huron River and Mill Creek floodplain means basements in the oldest part of town have flooded more than once, and we routinely find equipment that was underwater.
• Dexter's municipal water is softened at the plant, but homes outside the city on private wells have very hard water with iron that attacks water heater anodes quickly.
• Dexter sits where Mill Creek drops into the Huron River, and the lowest streets near the Cider Mill and Mill Creek Park hold fog and humidity on summer mornings. The town is far enough west that it picks up a little more snow than Ypsilanti and feels polar vortex cold snaps a degree or two harder. Hills and heavy oak cover around Gordon Hall and the metroparks shade a lot of roofs, which holds down cooling loads compared with the open subdivisions to the south.