Furnace Maintenance & Tune-Ups in Dundee, Michigan

Temprasure runs fall furnace maintenance across Dundee from September until the first real cold, and the visit is the same whether the furnace is a new two-stage unit in a 48131 subdivision or a 1990s 80 percent furnace in a 1860s–1930s village houses with 1990s–2010s subdivisions on the edges house near Plank Road. Burners, ignition, safeties, exchanger, combustion, gas pressure, airflow, and on condensing furnaces the condensate and venting. You get the readings in writing and flat-rate prices on anything we recommend, with no pressure to replace a furnace that is doing fine. Service-agreement members across Monroe County get first pick of dates.

Dundee houses and what that means for furnace maintenance

Dundee's housing has two distinct halves. The village core along Riley, Tecumseh and Monroe Streets is 1860s to 1930s frame and brick houses on Michigan basements or stone foundations, with retrofitted ductwork and, in a few cases, a boiler still in service. These houses have furnaces in low, damp basements near the river, water heaters that have been through a flood or two, and central air added in the 90s with a condenser on the side of the house. The post-2000 subdivisions along Ann Arbor Road and on the west side of US-23 are colonials and ranches on poured basements with builder-grade 80 percent furnaces and 13 SEER condensers that are now 15 to 25 years old and starting to fail. Outside the village limits, farmhouses and acreage homes on propane are common. Water in the village is municipal, but township addresses are on wells, and the well water in this part of Monroe County is hard enough to be a real factor in water heater and humidifier life.

Damp basements are the maintenance story in Dundee. The older 1860s–1930s village houses with 1990s–2010s subdivisions on the edges near Plank Road sit on Michigan basements or block foundations that sweat all summer, and by October the burners on an 80 percent furnace are coated in rust, the flame sensor is corroded and the bottom of the heat exchanger has been sitting in humid air for five months. Our fall tune-up for these Dundee, MI homes starts with the burner assembly and the exchanger because that is where the damage shows up first. We clean what can be cleaned, measure what can be measured, and tell you when the basement is winning so you can plan a replacement or a dehumidifier instead of being surprised by a CO reading.

In Dundee the furnace is the one appliance nobody thinks about until it fails at 11 p.m. with the temperature falling through the teens. That is when the phone rings, and that is when being 22 miles away matters. We know the 1860s–1930s village houses with 1990s–2010s subdivisions on the edges along Downtown Dundee on Main and Monroe Streets and the basements near the Dundee Village Hall, we carry parts for every brand that went into Monroe County homes, and we charge the same flat rate at midnight that we charge at noon. Dundee has about 4,000 in the village, with the township adding a few thousand more people and a lot of twenty-year-old furnaces; we would rather tell you yours has five winters left than sell you a new one it does not need.

Local details we plan around in Dundee

• The village of Dundee issues mechanical permits for work inside the village limits, while township addresses go through Dundee Township and Monroe County.
• Propane is the fuel on many township parcels outside the village, and we size and set up furnaces and water heaters for it as a matter of routine.
• Well water on the township side is hard, so water heater sediment flushing and humidifier pad replacement come up more often than in the Detroit-system suburbs.
• Dundee is flat, open Monroe County farmland with the River Raisin running through the middle of the village, and the millpond and river bottoms keep the downtown blocks humid and fog-prone in spring and fall. The open fields around the village let winter wind run unchecked, and Dundee is close enough to Lake Erie to pick up more cloud cover and occasional lake-enhanced snow than Ypsilanti sees. Summer afternoons are humid with dew points regularly near 70.