Ductwork Replacement in Romulus, Michigan

Houses in Romulus that were built in the 1940s–70s ranches and bungalows built around the airport have ductwork from that era, and a good share of it has reached the end. Temprasure comes out to Eureka Road corridor and anywhere else in 48174 with a manometer and a light, measures the static pressure the blower is fighting, walks the trunk and branches and returns, and tells you honestly whether sealing and a new return will get there or whether the system needs to come out. When it is replacement, we design it for the house as it is now, install it in a few days with the basement disruption spelled out in advance, and balance it with numbers you keep.

Romulus houses and what that means for duct replacement

Romulus homes are small, old and spread out, which makes for a specific kind of HVAC work. The 1940s and 50s houses along Wick, Ecorse and Beverly Roads are frame bungalows and ranches on crawlspaces or shallow block basements, many of them originally heated with oil or coal and converted to gas forced air sometime in the 60s or 70s. The 1960s and 70s ranches on the south side near Pennsylvania and Eureka Roads have slightly larger systems but the same tight utility closets and single-return duct layouts. A lot of these houses have had additions, enclosed porches and garages converted into rooms, and the furnace was rarely resized. Central air was almost never original, so condensers are add-ons from the 80s through the 2000s on circuits that were not planned for them. We find a lot of furnaces well past 25 years here, patched repeatedly, and a lot of houses where honest repair makes more sense than replacement.

The 1940s–70s ranches and bungalows built around the airport ranches in Eureka Road corridor are the houses where duct replacement most often makes sense in Romulus. The supply trunk runs the length of the basement ceiling and has spent sixty years above a damp floor or a sump pit, and the returns are panned joist bays, open to the basement at every joist and every pipe penetration. Sealing those pans from below is a losing effort; the fix is to build real return ducts and a new return trunk, replace the rusted supply trunk with sealed galvanized metal, and size the whole thing for the furnace and coil that are actually in the house. In a Romulus ranch that has never had even temperatures or has always been dusty, this is the project that changes it, and we have done it enough times in Wayne County to tell you what it involves before the estimate is written.

A lot of the comfort complaints we hear in Romulus are duct problems wearing a disguise: a bedroom near the Romulus Public Library on Wayne Road that never cools, a basement return that pulls in damp air, a furnace that short-cycles because the supply trunk cannot move what the blower is pushing. The 1940s–70s ranches and bungalows built around the airport around Pennsylvania Road and Wick Road corridor are especially prone to it. We are 13 miles away in Ypsilanti, and a duct repair or replacement in 48174 begins with a real airflow diagnosis, not a guess about what is behind the drywall.

Local details we plan around in Romulus

• Investor-owned rentals are common here, and we do a steady business in pre-purchase HVAC inspections and landlord repairs.
• A lot of 1940s and 50s houses still run on fuse boxes or 60-amp panels, and a new condenser or a heat pump needs an electrical upgrade first.
• Houses that were converted from oil heat sometimes still have an abandoned tank in the basement or yard that affects where a new furnace can go.
• Romulus is as flat as it gets in Wayne County, which is why the airport is here. The open runways and the cleared land around them let wind sweep across the neighborhoods in winter, and the acres of pavement and jet exhaust make summer afternoons a few degrees hotter than Belleville or Van Buren. Drainage is poor on the clay soil, so basements and crawlspaces near the Lower Rouge and the airport's drainage ditches stay damp well into summer.