Furnace Maintenance & Tune-Ups in Ann Arbor, Michigan

Furnaces in Ann Arbor work hard. A Washtenaw County winter puts well over 6,000 heating degree days on a furnace, and in the pre-war two-stories and 1950s–60s ranches, with university-era infill on every side around Kerrytown that furnace is often 15 to 25 years old and venting into a damp basement. Temprasure's maintenance visit is built for exactly that equipment. We inspect the exchanger every year because that is where old furnaces fail, we test the cheap parts that take them down, and we tell you honestly where the furnace stands so a replacement, if one is coming, happens on your schedule rather than during a polar vortex.

Ann Arbor houses and what that means for furnace maintenance

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.

Rental housing around Ann Arbor is where deferred furnace maintenance does the most damage. A furnace in a Kerrytown rental that has not been opened in six years is running on a filter that is black, a flame sensor that is barely signaling and a burner compartment that may be a mouse nest. Temprasure handles tune-ups for landlords across Washtenaw County: we schedule with the tenant, do the full visit including the combustion analysis and exchanger inspection, replace the filter, and send the owner a report with readings and photos. For owners with several Ann Arbor properties, one service agreement covers all of them with priority scheduling when a tenant calls about no heat.

We run a lot of winter miles in Ann Arbor, and most of them end in a basement under one of the pre-war two-stories and 1950s–60s ranches, with university-era infill on every side that make up its streets near Old West Side, Burns Park and Ann Arbor Hills. DTE Energy service reaches nearly every home here, so the equipment is familiar: 80 percent and 90-plus percent gas furnaces, a few boilers near Michigan Stadium, and the occasional propane furnace at the rural edge. What differs house to house is the ductwork and the wiring, and that is where a careful technician earns the dispatch fee. We arrive from Ypsilanti in about 16 minutes, any hour, at the same flat rate.

Local details we plan around in Ann Arbor

• 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 city's water is treated at its own plant and softened, so water heater sediment is lighter here than in surrounding townships on well water.
• 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.
• 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.