Heat Pump Installation & Replacement in Willis, Michigan

The question we hear most from Willis homeowners is whether a heat pump can really heat a house here. The honest answer: a modern cold-climate unit can, down to zero and below, and in the dual-fuel configuration we install most often in 48191, your gas furnace handles the handful of polar vortex nights anyway. For the rest of the heating season, which is most of it, the heat pump heats the house on electricity at a cost that beats DTE Energy gas for the mild range. Temprasure sizes it with a Manual J, installs R-454B equipment to spec, and handles the Washtenaw County permit and rebate paperwork.

Willis houses and what that means for heat pump installation

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.

The ductwork in Willis is the constraint we check first. Heat pump supply air runs 90 to 105 degrees, cooler than a gas furnace's, so the system depends on moving more air to deliver the same comfort. The 1950s–80s rural ranches and farmhouses with scattered 2000s builds in 48191 frequently have one return in a hallway and supply trunks sized for a smaller blower, and a heat pump on those ducts will feel weak and short cycle on defrost. On every Willis heat pump estimate we measure static pressure on the existing system and tell you whether a return needs to be added or a trunk resized. Sometimes it is a small add-on; sometimes it is the honest reason we recommend a conventional AC instead.

In Willis the furnace is the one appliance nobody thinks about until it fails at 11 p.m. with the temperature falling through the teens. That is when the phone rings, and that is when being 10 miles away matters. We know the 1950s–80s rural ranches and farmhouses with scattered 2000s builds along Bunton Road corridor and the basements near the Willis Post Office, we carry parts for every brand that went into Washtenaw County homes, and we charge the same flat rate at midnight that we charge at noon. Willis has about a few hundred in the hamlet, with several thousand on the Willis zip code people and a lot of twenty-year-old furnaces; we would rather tell you yours has five winters left than sell you a new one it does not need.

Local details we plan around in Willis

• 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.
• DTE gas follows Rawsonville Road and Willis Road through the crossroads, but most side roads are propane-only, and we confirm fuel type before quoting any equipment.
• 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.