HVAC Maintenance in Dundee, Michigan

Temprasure runs furnace and air conditioner maintenance across Monroe County, and Dundee is on the fall and spring schedule every year. We set furnace visits for September through November so the combustion check and carbon monoxide reading are done before the heating season, and AC visits for April through June so the refrigerant charge can be verified under real load. For Dundee homes from the Toledo Street neighborhoods to the streets around the River Raisin dam and millpond, that means two visits a year from the same person, a written record of every reading, and a system that is far less likely to make an emergency call on the coldest or hottest day of the year.

Dundee houses and what that means for hvac maintenance

Dundee's housing has two distinct halves. The village core along Riley, Tecumseh and Monroe Streets is 1860s to 1930s frame and brick houses on Michigan basements or stone foundations, with retrofitted ductwork and, in a few cases, a boiler still in service. These houses have furnaces in low, damp basements near the river, water heaters that have been through a flood or two, and central air added in the 90s with a condenser on the side of the house. The post-2000 subdivisions along Ann Arbor Road and on the west side of US-23 are colonials and ranches on poured basements with builder-grade 80 percent furnaces and 13 SEER condensers that are now 15 to 25 years old and starting to fail. Outside the village limits, farmhouses and acreage homes on propane are common. Water in the village is municipal, but township addresses are on wells, and the well water in this part of Monroe County is hard enough to be a real factor in water heater and humidifier life.

Combustion safety is the part of Dundee maintenance we take most seriously, and the housing explains why. The 1860s–1930s village houses with 1990s–2010s subdivisions on the edges around the Toledo Street neighborhoods almost all have gas furnaces in basements that stay damp from a sump pit or a Michigan-basement foundation, and moisture rusts a heat exchanger from the outside while the furnace looks fine from the front. On every Dundee furnace tune-up we inspect the exchanger with a light and mirror, run the combustion analyzer, and read carbon monoxide at the registers with the blower running. A furnace that passes gets a report that says so. A furnace that does not gets shut down with the evidence shown to you, and we have made that call in Monroe County basements more than once without ever being wrong about it.

Our trucks are in Dundee most weeks, because Monroe County is where a large share of our work is and 48131 is a short run from Ypsilanti. The 1860s–1930s village houses with 1990s–2010s subdivisions on the edges that line the streets near Downtown Dundee on Main and Monroe Streets and the River Raisin dam and millpond have usually been through two or three furnaces and at least one air conditioner, often installed by different companies with different ideas about ductwork, and sorting that out is what a whole-system visit is for. We check the furnace, the coil, the condenser, the thermostat and the ducts as one system, because in a Dundee house they fail as one system.

Local details we plan around in Dundee

• The 2000s subdivisions were built with flex-duct branch runs that sag and restrict airflow, which is the usual cause of weak upstairs airflow here.
• Well water on the township side is hard, so water heater sediment flushing and humidifier pad replacement come up more often than in the Detroit-system suburbs.
• Propane is the fuel on many township parcels outside the village, and we size and set up furnaces and water heaters for it as a matter of routine.
• Dundee is flat, open Monroe County farmland with the River Raisin running through the middle of the village, and the millpond and river bottoms keep the downtown blocks humid and fog-prone in spring and fall. The open fields around the village let winter wind run unchecked, and Dundee is close enough to Lake Erie to pick up more cloud cover and occasional lake-enhanced snow than Ypsilanti sees. Summer afternoons are humid with dew points regularly near 70.