Furnace Repair in Dundee, Michigan

Temprasure has fixed a lot of furnaces in Dundee, MI that another company said were done. Not because the other company was lying, but because a furnace that will not stay lit looks terrifying to a homeowner and a quick replacement quote is easy to write. We diagnose with a manometer, a meter and a combustion analyzer, inspect the heat exchanger on every Dundee call, and tell you exactly what failed. For Monroe County homes on DTE Energy gas, that usually means a repair in the low hundreds and a furnace that runs another five winters.

Dundee houses and what that means for furnace repair

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.

Basements in Dundee are hard on furnaces. The older homes around the Riley Street historic blocks have Michigan basements with damp stone or block walls, and the moisture rusts burner assemblies, corrodes flame sensors and eventually eats through 80 percent heat exchangers from the outside in. Even the drier block basements of the 1860s–1930s village houses with 1990s–2010s subdivisions on the edges tend to be where the dryer, the cat litter and the laundry chemicals live, and chlorides in that air are a known heat exchanger killer. On a Dundee repair visit we look at the combustion air situation and the condition of the exchanger, not just the part that stopped working, because a furnace in a damp Monroe County basement needs a different conversation than one in a dry utility room.

A no-heat call from 48131 gets priority in winter, and the drive from Ypsilanti to Dundee is about 32 minutes. The houses here, from the 1860s–1930s village houses with 1990s–2010s subdivisions on the edges around Downtown Dundee on Main and Monroe Streets and Tecumseh Street to the newer builds near Ann Arbor Road north of the village, run almost entirely on DTE Energy, and the failures we see are the same ones we see everywhere in Southeast Michigan: dirty flame sensors, failed hot-surface ignitors, stuck pressure switches, cracked exchangers on furnaces that should have been retired. We diagnose with a combustion analyzer and a manometer, not a flashlight, and we show you the reading before we quote the repair.

Local details we plan around in Dundee

• The 2000s subdivisions were built with flex-duct branch runs that sag and restrict airflow, which is the usual cause of weak upstairs airflow here.
• River Raisin flooding has reached basements in the downtown blocks more than once, and we set replacement equipment on raised pads and recommend flood-aware placement.
• 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.
• 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.