Furnace Repair in Salem Township, Michigan

Every furnace repair call from Salem Township gets the same questions from us before we leave the shop: Is the switch on the side of the furnace on? Is the filter black? Does it try to light? Those thirty seconds on the phone sometimes fix the problem outright, and when they do not, they tell us which parts to have ready. We serve all of Salem Township, from Angle Road and Tower Road area to the the Salem-Plymouth township line along Napier Road area, at the same flat rate day or night, and 48175 addresses are well inside our same-day range. The truck is stocked for every brand you will find in a Washtenaw County basement.

Salem Township houses and what that means for furnace repair

Salem's houses are nearly all custom or owner-built rather than tract, and they are spread thin, so our calls here are long drives between very different problems. The 1850s–1920s farmhouses in and around the village have Michigan basements, rough stone walls and ductwork added in the 1960s or later, often with a furnace that is serving an addition it was never sized for. The 1970s–90s ranches and split-levels along Currie, Tower and Angle Roads sit on crawlspaces or walkout basements and frequently started life on fuel oil or propane. The 1995–2015 estate homes near Napier Road and along North Territorial are large two-stories with two or more furnaces, zoned systems and finished walkouts, commonly on propane with a buried tank. Many properties have a heated barn, workshop or pole building with its own unit heater. Older homes with converted oil furnaces and unlined chimneys are the most frequent safety finding we make here.

Basements in Salem Township are hard on furnaces. The older homes around Angle Road and Tower Road area 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 1970s–2000s acreage homes and estate builds with century-old farmhouses between them 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 Salem Township 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 Washtenaw County basement needs a different conversation than one in a dry utility room.

Salem Township 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 1970s–2000s acreage homes and estate builds with century-old farmhouses between them near Salem Township Hall on Six Mile Road and the Salem-Plymouth township line along Napier Road, the hot-water boilers in the older houses around the village of Salem, and the furnaces in newer subdivisions out toward Seven Mile Road corridor where builder-grade equipment hits its first real failures around year ten. The shop is 14 miles away, the truck carries the parts that fail, and a heating call in Salem Township ends with heat on the first visit far more often than not.

Local details we plan around in Salem Township

• DTE gas reaches a few corridors near the village and the Plymouth border, but propane is the dominant fuel across the township and many homes have large buried tanks.
• Every home is on a private well, and Salem's well water is hard and often high in iron and sulfur, which attacks water heater anodes and leaves scale on humidifier pads.
• Older farmhouses and 1970s ranches that were converted from fuel oil often still have the original oil chimney, and lining it is a standard part of any gas furnace replacement.
• Salem is higher and more rolling than the townships along the Huron, and it is exposed to wind from every direction across open fields, with winter gusts that make the northwest corner of any house the cold corner. Snowfall runs slightly heavier here than in Ypsilanti because of the elevation and the distance from the river valley. Woodlots and the Johnson Creek drain hold summer humidity in the low spots, while the higher ground stays drier.