Water Heater Installation in Willis, Michigan

When a water heater fails in Willis, the replacement usually cannot wait for a convenient week. Temprasure keeps the 40- and 50-gallon gas tanks that most Washtenaw County basements use available, and a call from 48191 in the morning is often a new heater running by afternoon. We are about 18 minutes from Willis, the estimate is free, the price is one flat number that includes the permit, the new connectors, the expansion tank where the house needs one and the haul-away of the old tank. For the 1950s–80s rural ranches and farmhouses with scattered 2000s builds homes around Rawsonville Road north toward Bemis, we also check the chimney and the gas line before assuming the new tank can simply go where the old one was.

Willis houses and what that means for water heater replacement

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.

Water quality in Willis is the reason we talk about anode rods and tankless honestly. The municipal water in town and the well water in the rural parts of Washtenaw County are both hard, and some of the wells around Rawsonville Road north toward Bemis carry enough iron that a magnesium anode produces a sulfur smell within months. On a new tank we can install an aluminum-zinc or powered anode where that is a known issue, and we tell customers when to have the rod checked so the tank reaches fifteen years instead of ten. For tankless, we are straightforward: on Willis water it needs annual descaling, and a house with a half-inch gas line and a 1950s–80s rural ranches and farmhouses with scattered 2000s builds meter is not a cheap conversion. Some homes are great candidates and some are not, and we say which.

Water heaters in Willis fail the way they fail everywhere in Washtenaw County: quietly for years, then all at once on a weekday morning. The 1950s–80s rural ranches and farmhouses with scattered 2000s builds around Willis Road east toward Sumpter and the Willis crossroads at Willis and Rawsonville Roads mostly have 40- or 50-gallon atmospheric gas tanks on DTE Energy service, often in a basement near a sump pit where a leak goes unnoticed until the floor is wet. We are 18 minutes from 48191 with thermocouples, gas valves, elements, thermostats and relief valves on the truck, and when the tank itself is done we replace it the same day whenever a unit is in stock.

Local details we plan around in Willis

• All homes are on septic, and high-efficiency furnace condensate needs a neutralizer or a discharge point that does not feed the drain field.
• Spring flooding in crawlspaces near Paint Creek is routine, so we recommend elevating any furnace or water heater that sits below grade.
• 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.
• 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.