New Home HVAC Inspection in Lodi Township, Michigan

Buying a house in Lodi Township 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 Lodi Township house, test it with a combustion analyzer and gauges, walk the ductwork, and deliver a written report to you inside the contingency window. Lodi Township is about 22 minutes from our shop, so scheduling around a tight deadline is manageable, and the 1970s–2000s acreage homes and golf-course customs on former farmland housing around Saline-Waterworks Road area is exactly the kind where what we find changes the negotiation.

Lodi Township houses and what that means for pre-purchase inspection

Lodi homes almost all have one thing in common: they are on their own well and septic, and a good number of them are on propane. The Travis Pointe area is 1980s–2000s large customs with multiple furnaces, finished walkouts and long duct runs that were rarely balanced. Scattered along Pleasant Lake, Parker and Wagner Roads are 1970s–90s ranches and split-levels on crawlspaces or partial basements, often with a 1990s furnace that is on its last heat exchanger and a condenser that still runs R-22. The 1800s–1920s farmhouses that survive have Michigan basements with dirt or rough concrete floors, additions off the back and a furnace that is doing the work of two. Along the Textile Road border, 1998–2010 subdivision colonials on poured basements carry builder-grade 80 percent furnaces and single-stage air conditioners now hitting twenty years. Barns, workshops and pole buildings with their own heaters are a regular part of the conversation out here.

The 1970s–2000s acreage homes and golf-course customs on former farmland houses around Saline-Waterworks Road area are where a pre-purchase inspection in Lodi Township earns its keep. The furnace may be the second or third in that basement, but the ductwork, the chimney and the water heater venting are often original, and a general inspector does not evaluate any of them. We check whether a newer high-efficiency furnace left the water heater alone on a chimney too large for it, whether the returns are panned joist bays pulling basement air into the house, and whether the furnace next to the sump pit has rust on the heat exchanger from decades of damp. Those three findings come up constantly in older Lodi Township stock, each is a real cost, and each is something a buyer in 48176 can negotiate before closing instead of discovering afterward.

Whether it is a service agreement for a house near Pittsfield-Lodi border subdivisions off Textile or a pre-purchase inspection on a listing out by Parker Road area, our planned work in Lodi Township follows the same rule: measure, document, explain. Buyers in Washtenaw County are competing hard for the 1970s–2000s acreage homes and golf-course customs on former farmland around the Washtenaw Farm Council Grounds, and a general home inspector's ten-minute look at the furnace is not enough to know what the next five winters will cost. We are about 22 minutes from 48176, we fit inspections inside the contingency window, and we put the findings in writing you can negotiate with.

Local details we plan around in Lodi Township

• DTE gas reaches the Travis Pointe area and the subdivisions near Textile Road, but many roads in the middle and west of the township have no gas main, so propane furnaces and water heaters are routine.
• Pole barns and workshops with unit heaters or hanging furnaces are common, and homeowners here often ask us to look at those along with the house.
• Mechanical permits for Lodi addresses go through Washtenaw County's building department, and the county expects permits on furnace and condenser replacements even on rural parcels.
• Lodi is flat, open and largely treeless outside the yards themselves, and it takes winter wind straight off the fields from the west and southwest, which makes infiltration a bigger factor in heating loads than it is in the shaded neighborhoods of Ann Arbor. Summer sun on a west-facing wall with no canopy pushes condensers hard. The Saline River headwaters and the low ground near Saline-Waterworks Road hold some humidity, but most of the township drains well.