New Home HVAC Inspection in Dexter, Michigan

Buying a house in Dexter means inheriting its furnace, its air conditioner, its water heater and its ducts, and the general home inspection tells you almost nothing about any of them. Temprasure does the HVAC inspection that the inspector's report recommends: we open the equipment in a Dexter house, test it with a combustion analyzer and gauges, walk the ductwork, and deliver a written report to you inside the contingency window. Dexter is about 32 minutes from our shop, so scheduling around a tight deadline is manageable, and the 1990s–2000s subdivision homes around an 1830s village core housing around Downtown Dexter is exactly the kind where what we find changes the negotiation.

Dexter houses and what that means for pre-purchase inspection

In the historic core around Grand Street, Fifth Street and Broad Street, we work on 1840s–1910s frame and brick homes with fieldstone basements, low ceilings and ductwork that has been reworked three or four times. Some of these still have radiators on a boiler and a separate air handler for cooling tucked into an attic. The subdivisions that make up most of Dexter's housing were built between roughly 1994 and 2008. Huron Farms and Dexter Crossing are two-story colonials and cape-style homes on full poured basements, usually with an original 80 percent furnace, a 10 to 12 SEER condenser, and a water heater that has already been replaced once. Westridge and the newer phases carry 90-plus furnaces and two-stage equipment. Beyond the city line, Mast Road, Island Lake Road and North Territorial have 1970s–90s custom homes and older farmhouses on well, septic and sometimes propane, with walkout basements that bring their own moisture issues.

New construction in the subdivisions around Dexter benefits from an inspection as much as the older stock. Builder installs in Washtenaw County are done quickly and commissioned rarely, and a new system in Downtown Dexter can have a refrigerant charge set by pressure alone, a condensate trap that was never primed, flex duct crushed by other trades in the attic and a furnace left on the default blower speed. All of that is a warranty conversation the buyer wants to have before the builder's final walkthrough, not after the first summer. We test the new system the way we commission our own installs and put the findings in a report you can hand the builder.

Dexter is 19 miles from our shop, which is close enough that a maintenance visit or an inspection fits easily into a route and far enough that we schedule it rather than squeeze it in. The 1990s–2000s subdivision homes around an 1830s village core near Baker Road corridor and Mast Road area are exactly the homes where a twice-a-year tune-up pays for itself: furnaces on DTE Energy that have never had the flame sensor cleaned, air conditioners near Gordon Hall with capacitors drifting out of tolerance, and water heaters that have not been flushed since they were installed. We catch those before they become a January phone call.

Local details we plan around in Dexter

• The city proper is on DTE gas, but Consumers Energy territory begins just west of town and many addresses with a Dexter mailing address are actually on Consumers or on propane.
• Mechanical permits in the city go through Dexter's building department, while township addresses go through Washtenaw County, and the two have slightly different inspection habits.
• Many of the 1990s subdivision homes have a furnace and water heater sharing an undersized masonry chimney that needs a liner when either appliance is upgraded.
• Dexter sits where Mill Creek drops into the Huron River, and the lowest streets near the Cider Mill and Mill Creek Park hold fog and humidity on summer mornings. The town is far enough west that it picks up a little more snow than Ypsilanti and feels polar vortex cold snaps a degree or two harder. Hills and heavy oak cover around Gordon Hall and the metroparks shade a lot of roofs, which holds down cooling loads compared with the open subdivisions to the south.