Heating Repair in Dexter, Michigan

A no-heat call from Dexter during a cold snap is the call we built the business around. Al answers the phone, walks you through the furnace switch, the breaker and the filter, and if that does not fix it he is on his way with ignitors, sensors, switches, circulators and defrost boards for every brand of heating equipment in Washtenaw County. We serve every 48130 address at the same flat rate, with no overtime charge, and we tell you honestly whether the system is worth fixing before we fix it. If it is not, you get a free replacement estimate instead of a surprise.

Dexter houses and what that means for heating 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.

Rural addresses on the edges of Dexter add propane to the mix. A propane furnace is the same equipment as a natural gas unit with a different orifice and a different manifold pressure, but it is unforgiving if the pressure is wrong or the tank runs low in a cold snap and the regulator freezes. On a Dexter, MI no-heat call to a propane home we check the tank level and regulator before anything else, because a furnace that will not light on an empty tank is not a furnace problem. Once gas is confirmed, the diagnosis and repair proceed like any other, with a manometer to set the pressure correctly for propane.

In Dexter 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 19 miles away matters. We know the 1990s–2000s subdivision homes around an 1830s village core along Dexter-Ann Arbor Road corridor and the basements near Gordon Hall, 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. Dexter has about 4,500 in the city, with roughly 15,000 more in the surrounding townships 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 Dexter

• The city proper is on DTE gas, but Consumers Energy territory begins just west of town and many addresses with a Dexter mailing address are actually on Consumers or on propane.
• Mechanical permits in the city go through Dexter's building department, while township addresses go through Washtenaw County, and the two have slightly different inspection habits.
• 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 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.