New Home HVAC Inspection in Willis, Michigan

A pre-purchase HVAC inspection in Willis from Temprasure is the same instrument-based look we give our own customers' systems, applied to a house you are about to buy. We decode the serial numbers for real ages, inspect the heat exchanger, measure combustion and carbon monoxide, test the air conditioner under load when the weather allows, check the water heater and its venting, and walk the basement and attic ducts of the 1950s–80s rural ranches and farmhouses with scattered 2000s builds homes common in Rawsonville Road north toward Bemis. The report flags safety items first, describes what each system is likely to need, and gives you what you need to ask the seller for a credit or a repair in Washtenaw County.

Willis houses and what that means for pre-purchase inspection

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.

New construction in the subdivisions around Willis 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 Rawsonville Road north toward Bemis 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.

Willis is 10 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 1950s–80s rural ranches and farmhouses with scattered 2000s builds near Hitchingham Road area and Tuttle Hill Road south of Willis 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 Lincoln Consolidated Schools campus 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 Willis

• Private wells supply every home, and the water is hard with iron and sometimes sulfur, which eats water heater anodes and leaves sediment that needs flushing.
• Spring flooding in crawlspaces near Paint Creek is routine, so we recommend elevating any furnace or water heater that sits below grade.
• 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.
• 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.