HVAC Maintenance and Tune-Ups in Ypsilanti and Southeast Michigan

There are two kinds of HVAC tune-ups sold in Southeast Michigan. One is a 20-minute visit where a technician changes the filter, vacuums the burner compartment, puts a sticker on the furnace and leaves a quote for something. The other is what Temprasure does: an hour or more with a combustion analyzer, a manometer, a multimeter and a set of gauges, ending in a written report of what every reading was and what it should be. The first kind is cheap because it does not accomplish anything. The second kind is how a furnace in a Michigan basement gets to 25 years and an air conditioner gets to 18.

The furnace visit happens in the fall, before the first night DTE gas starts flowing hard. We pull the burners and clean them, check the heat exchanger for cracks with a light and a mirror and on newer furnaces with a combustion reading that would reveal a leak, test the flame sensor and clean it, verify the ignitor's resistance, measure inducer draft and pressure switch operation, check gas pressure at the manifold, confirm the temperature rise falls inside the range on the rating plate, and run a carbon monoxide check at the registers. That last item is not a formality in a region where almost every house has a gas furnace and a lot of them sit next to a sump pit that keeps the basement damp enough to rust a heat exchanger from the outside.

The air conditioning visit happens in the spring, usually April or May, once it is warm enough outside to run the system under load. We clean the condenser coil, which in this area is coated with cottonwood seed by late May, test the capacitor against its rated microfarads, inspect the contactor for pitting, measure refrigerant charge by superheat and subcooling instead of just reading a pressure, check the evaporator coil and the condensate drain and float switch, verify the temperature split across the coil, and read the amp draw on the compressor and fan motor against the nameplate. A capacitor that reads 10% low in April gets replaced before it strands you in July.

Both visits include the parts of the system that heating and cooling share: the blower wheel and motor, the filter rack and the filter size that actually fits it, the static pressure across the system, the thermostat calibration and wiring, the condensate pump if there is one, and the ductwork connections we can see from the basement. High static pressure is the most common finding on a first visit to a house we have not serviced before, and it is usually an undersized return or a filter that is too restrictive for the blower. Fixing that on a tune-up prevents a motor replacement two years later.

Maintenance is also when we tell you the truth about the equipment's age. A furnace with a rusting heat exchanger or an air conditioner with a slow leak at the coil gets flagged in the report with an honest estimate of how long it has, so a replacement can be planned instead of forced on the coldest night of the year. Customers who want both visits scheduled automatically with priority service and a repair discount can look at the Temprasure Service Agreement, but a single tune-up is available to anyone and priced flat.