Thermostat Installation in Willis, Michigan

Houses in Willis have thermostat wiring from every era of the 1950s–80s rural ranches and farmhouses with scattered 2000s builds that fill Washtenaw County. Two-conductor cable to a round mercury dial in the older blocks around the Willis Road and Rawsonville Road corner, four conductors in the colonials that got central air in the 1980s, and five or more in the subdivisions near the Willis crossroads at Willis and Rawsonville Roads where the builder ran enough wire but the installer never used it. What your Willis house needs for a modern thermostat depends on which of those you have, and that is what we check before recommending anything. Temprasure installs Ecobee, Nest, Honeywell Home and Sensi units, plus plain digital thermostats for people who want nothing connected, and we quote the whole job flat-rate.

Willis houses and what that means for thermostats

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.

Two-stage and variable-speed equipment in Willis is often running at a fraction of what it can because of the thermostat. The subdivisions in 48191 that were built or re-equipped in the 1950s–80s rural ranches and farmhouses with scattered 2000s builds got two-stage furnaces and air conditioners, and a lot of them were paired with a basic single-stage thermostat that never calls for high. On a cold Washtenaw County morning the furnace plods along on low for an hour; on a humid July afternoon the air conditioner never ramps up enough to pull moisture out of the house. We wire the second stage, set the staging logic in the thermostat rather than leaving it to the furnace board's timer, and set the dehumidification call so the system runs the way the equipment was designed to in Willis.

With about a few hundred in the hamlet, with several thousand on the Willis zip code residents and housing that runs from the 1950s–80s rural ranches and farmhouses with scattered 2000s builds around Bunton Road corridor to the newer streets near Tuttle Hill Road south of Willis, Willis keeps us busy year-round. The equipment is on DTE Energy for heat and DTE Energy for cooling, the basements near Lincoln Consolidated Schools campus are prone to the same moisture issues as the rest of Washtenaw County, and the ductwork in a lot of these houses was never sized for the air conditioner that was bolted on later. We are 10 miles away, we service every brand, and we quote a flat rate before we start.

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.
• 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.
• 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.