Furnace Repair in Willis, Michigan

No heat in Willis is not a problem you should have to explain to a call center. When you call Temprasure, Al answers, and he is the one who shows up. We have been running furnace repairs across Washtenaw County long enough to know the common failures in 48191: flame sensors that need cleaning, hot-surface ignitors that cracked, inducer motors that gave up, condensate traps that clogged on high-efficiency units. The truck is stocked for all of it, the repair is quoted as one flat number before work starts, and there is no night or weekend surcharge for Willis customers.

Willis houses and what that means for furnace repair

The typical Willis house is a 1950s–80s ranch on a crawlspace or a shallow block basement, built by a farm family or an auto worker on a piece of split-off land, and heated by a furnace that has been replaced once or twice without anyone enlarging the ductwork. Many of these were originally on fuel oil, and we still find abandoned oil tanks in basements and oil-to-gas conversion furnaces that are long past their design life. The farmhouses along Bunton and Tuttle Hill Roads are 1870s–1920s two-stories with Michigan basements and a forced-air system threaded in after the fact, usually with cold upstairs bedrooms as the result. Scattered 1990s–2010s acreage homes are colonials and ranches on full basements with 80 or 90 percent furnaces, more often propane than natural gas. Manufactured and modular homes are a larger share of the housing here than in the rest of the county, and their package units and small downflow furnaces are a regular part of our work.

High-efficiency furnaces in Willis 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 Willis, MI homes near Paint Creek 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.

Heating calls from Willis 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 rural ranches and farmhouses with scattered 2000s builds around the Augusta-Sumpter township line and Rawsonville Road north toward Bemis 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 the Willis Post Office and out toward Willis Road east toward Sumpter, 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 Willis

• Private wells supply every home, and the water is hard with iron and sometimes sulfur, which eats water heater anodes and leaves sediment that needs flushing.
• Abandoned fuel-oil tanks and oil-era chimneys are common in the older ranches, and venting a new gas furnace into one of those chimneys often requires a liner.
• Spring flooding in crawlspaces near Paint Creek is routine, so we recommend elevating any furnace or water heater that sits below grade.
• Willis is as flat as anywhere in Washtenaw County, and drainage is slow enough that ditches and field tiles run most of the spring. Crawlspaces near Paint Creek and along the lower stretches of Bunton Road stay wet into June, and that moisture finds its way into ductwork and furnace cabinets. Winter wind crosses the fields unbroken, and summer brings long humid stretches with little shade outside the old farmstead windbreaks.