Furnace Maintenance & Tune-Ups in Willis, Michigan

Nobody in Willis wants to spend a January night at 52 degrees waiting on a parts run, and a fall tune-up from Temprasure is the cheapest way to avoid it. We find the flame sensor that would have failed in February, the ignitor with the hairline crack, the condensate trap on the 96 percent furnace near Paint Creek that would have frozen on the first minus-10 night. Willis, MI is well inside our 20-mile radius, DTE Energy customers there get the same flat rate as our neighbors in Ypsilanti, and service-agreement members get first choice of fall dates.

Willis houses and what that means for furnace maintenance

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.

Rental housing around Willis is where deferred furnace maintenance does the most damage. A furnace in a Arkona Road area 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 Willis properties, one service agreement covers all of them with priority scheduling when a tenant calls about no heat.

Willis winters are long enough that a furnace runs more hours in a year here than an air conditioner runs in five. We maintain and repair the gas furnaces in the 1950s–80s rural ranches and farmhouses with scattered 2000s builds near the Willis Post Office and Lincoln Consolidated Schools campus, the hot-water boilers in the older houses around Hitchingham Road area, and the furnaces in newer subdivisions out toward Arkona Road area where builder-grade equipment hits its first real failures around year ten. The shop is 10 miles away, the truck carries the parts that fail, and a heating call in Willis ends with heat on the first visit far more often than not.

Local details we plan around in Willis

• Permits for Willis addresses go through Washtenaw County's building department, and inspections are scheduled on the county's southern-township rotation.
• Abandoned fuel-oil tanks and oil-era chimneys are common in the older ranches, and venting a new gas furnace into one of those chimneys often requires a liner.
• 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.