24-Hour Emergency Heating Repair in Ypsilanti and Southeast Michigan

A furnace that quits at midnight in a Michigan January is a genuine emergency, and Temprasure treats it like one. We are open 24 hours a day, every day of the year, and the phone rings to Al rather than to an answering service that will take a message. One of our reviews is from a New Year's Eve furnace call. Others are from people who went through a list of companies on a Sunday night before someone picked up. We would rather be the first number you try. The dispatch fee and the flat-rate repair price are the same at 3 a.m. on a holiday as they are on a weekday afternoon, because a cold house is not a reason to charge more for the same ignitor.

What counts as a heating emergency? No heat when the outdoor temperature is at or below freezing, especially when the forecast is dropping further, because pipes in exterior walls and Michigan basements start freezing within hours once the house falls into the 40s. A home with infants, elderly family members or anyone whose health is affected by cold. A carbon monoxide alarm, which means leave the house and call 911 before you call us. A gas smell, which means leave the house, do not touch any switches, and call DTE Energy or 911 from outside; we come after the utility has made the house safe. A furnace making a boom, a burning smell or smoke. A boiler relief valve discharging steadily. A heat pump iced solid with the house losing ground on backup heat.

Most emergency heating repairs are the same handful of failures we fix during the day, at a worse hour and in worse weather. A flame sensor that finally cannot prove flame. A hot-surface ignitor that cracked on the thousandth cycle of the season. An inducer motor that seized. A pressure switch held open by a condensate line that froze or an exterior PVC vent that iced over during a polar vortex. A blower capacitor that drifted too far. A control board taken out by a power blip during an ice storm. On a boiler, a circulator that stopped or air that locked the upstairs zone. On a heat pump, a defrost board that let the outdoor coil turn into an ice block. The truck is stocked for all of these, which is why most emergency calls end with heat restored that night rather than with a promise to return after a parts run.

While you wait, a few things help. Check the switch on the side of the furnace, which looks like a light switch and gets bumped. Check the breaker once. If the furnace is a high-efficiency unit and the weather is bitter, go outside and look at the PVC pipes coming through the wall; if the exhaust is capped with ice or snow, clearing it may restart the furnace. If the thermostat is blank, try new batteries. Open cabinet doors under sinks on exterior walls and let faucets drip to protect pipes. Close off unused rooms. Keep everyone in one room with a safe space heater if you have one, never a gas range or a grill. If the house is below 50 and dropping, tell us; that moves you up the list.

Emergency heating repair gets the same diagnosis and the same honesty as any other call. We test with a meter and a manometer, inspect the heat exchanger and check for CO, show you what failed, and quote the repair as one flat number before any work. If the honest answer is that the exchanger is cracked on a 22-year-old furnace, we will say so, do what we safely can to get you through the night, and come back with a free replacement estimate when you have had a chance to think. Nobody gets pressured into a new furnace at 2 a.m.