Whole-Home Humidifier Installation in Willis, Michigan

The hard water across Willis is the reason humidifiers here need attention every year. Scale from Washtenaw County municipal water or a well builds on the evaporator pad until it is a solid block, the solenoid sticks, and the drain line clogs and sends water down the furnace cabinet toward the control board. Temprasure installs humidifiers in Willis with that in mind, with the unit mounted so a leak drains away from the furnace, and we change the pad on every fall tune-up. For 1950s–80s rural ranches and farmhouses with scattered 2000s builds houses near Lincoln Consolidated Schools campus where the existing unit has been neglected, we clean, repad and rewire it, or replace it when that is the better value.

Willis houses and what that means for humidifiers

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.

The 1950s–80s rural ranches and farmhouses with scattered 2000s builds homes that fill Tuttle Hill Road south of Willis are the ones that need humidity the most and tolerate it the least. They leak enough air that winter humidity falls into the teens, and they often still have single-pane or aluminum-frame windows that sweat and frost at humidity levels a newer house handles easily. The answer in Willis is control, not a bigger humidifier. We install an automatic humidistat with an outdoor sensor so the target drops to the low thirties on a zero-degree Washtenaw County night and rises toward 40 on a mild one, and we set a fan-powered unit where the house is leaky enough that a bypass cannot keep up. The static stops, the floors stop gapping, and the window glass stays dry.

We install, repair and maintain furnace-mounted humidifiers throughout Willis, which is a 10-mile run from Ypsilanti. The 1950s–80s rural ranches and farmhouses with scattered 2000s builds that make up most of the housing here are a good fit for a bypass or fan-powered unit, and the hard municipal and well water in Washtenaw County means the pad needs changing every year and the scale needs watching. Homes near the Willis crossroads at Willis and Rawsonville Roads and Lincoln Consolidated Schools campus on DTE Energy heat tend to run the furnace long hours in January, so a properly set humidistat matters as much as the unit itself.

Local details we plan around in Willis

• All homes are on septic, and high-efficiency furnace condensate needs a neutralizer or a discharge point that does not feed the drain field.
• 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.
• Permits for Willis addresses go through Washtenaw County's building department, and inspections are scheduled on the county's southern-township rotation.
• 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.