New Home HVAC Inspection in Ann Arbor, Michigan

If you are under contract on a house in Ann Arbor and the inspection report came back with "recommend evaluation by a licensed HVAC contractor," that line is the reason this page exists. Temprasure is that contractor for buyers across Washtenaw County. Call or text with the address and the deadline, and we will get out to Lansdowne or anywhere else in 48103, test everything that can be tested, and send you a plain-language report with photos. For a pre-war two-stories and 1950s–60s ranches, with university-era infill on every side house with equipment of unknown age, it is the most useful money you will spend during the contingency period.

Ann Arbor houses and what that means for pre-purchase inspection

Ann Arbor gives us almost every housing type in one zip code. The Old West Side and Old Fourth Ward are full of 1880s–1920s frame houses with stone or rubble foundations, fieldstone basements that stay damp, and furnaces that replaced boilers or gravity units sometime in the 1960s or 70s. Many of those homes still have cast-iron radiators fed by a boiler, and a surprising number have both a boiler and a separate forced-air system added for cooling. Burns Park and Ann Arbor Hills houses are larger 1920s–50s builds with plaster walls, so getting a second return or a bigger supply trunk in is slow work. The ranches and split-levels of the west side were built with 80,000 to 100,000 BTU furnaces that are now oversized for insulated versions of the same house. Condos near Briarwood and Pittsfield Village often have furnaces in closets or attics with tight clearances. Student rentals near campus run the oldest equipment in the city, and landlords routinely call us for emergency service and new-purchase inspections.

New construction in the subdivisions around Ann Arbor benefits from an inspection as much as the older stock. Builder installs in Washtenaw County are done quickly and commissioned rarely, and a new system in Lansdowne can have a refrigerant charge set by pressure alone, a condensate trap that was never primed, flex duct crushed by other trades in the attic and a furnace left on the default blower speed. All of that is a warranty conversation the buyer wants to have before the builder's final walkthrough, not after the first summer. We test the new system the way we commission our own installs and put the findings in a report you can hand the builder.

Ann Arbor is 7 miles from our shop, which is close enough that a maintenance visit or an inspection fits easily into a route and far enough that we schedule it rather than squeeze it in. The pre-war two-stories and 1950s–60s ranches, with university-era infill on every side near Georgetown and Pittsfield Village are exactly the homes where a twice-a-year tune-up pays for itself: furnaces on DTE Energy that have never had the flame sensor cleaned, air conditioners near Gallup Park with capacitors drifting out of tolerance, and water heaters that have not been flushed since they were installed. We catch those before they become a January phone call.

Local details we plan around in Ann Arbor

• The large number of boiler-and-radiator homes means we see hydronic work here far more than anywhere else in our radius.
• Fieldstone foundations in the oldest neighborhoods sweat enough that furnace cabinets and water heater bases corrode early unless they sit on blocks or a pad.
• Ann Arbor has its own building department with its own mechanical permit process, and inspectors here want to see combustion air, condensate routing and flue sizing done by the book.
• The Huron River cuts a deep valley through the north side of Ann Arbor, and the Northside, Lower Town and Gallup Park neighborhoods feel it as morning fog, heavier dew and basements that sweat in July. The downtown core holds heat with all its brick and pavement, so attics and upper floors there run several degrees hotter than the leafy blocks of Burns Park and the Old West Side, where mature oaks and maples shade roofs and cut peak cooling loads noticeably.