Service Agreements in Milan, Michigan

Most emergency calls we run in Milan are on systems nobody has opened in years. The flame sensor that locks the furnace out on a January night in 48160, the capacitor that strands an air conditioner near the Hack House Museum on the first 90-degree day, the condensate drain that floods a Hurd Street neighborhood basement: every one of them shows up on a tune-up months before it fails. The Temprasure Service Agreement puts those two tune-ups on our calendar instead of yours, moves you to the front of the board when something does break, and takes a discount off the repair. One plan, no tiers, and nothing in it designed to sell you a new system.

Milan houses and what that means for service agreements

Downtown Milan and the streets around Wilson Park and Hurd Street are 1880s–1930s frame houses on stone or block basements with the original furnace location in a tight corner and a gas line that has been extended a few times. Several still have gravity-furnace duct trunks that were reused when forced air went in. The 1950s–70s ranches along Dexter Street, County Street and the Carpenter Road side of town often sit on crawlspaces or slabs, and electric baseboard or wall furnaces show up in a few that never got ductwork. Newer subdivisions off Platt Road and Arkona Road are 1990s–2000s colonials and ranches on full basements with 80 percent furnaces and R-22 condensers that are now getting replaced in bulk. On the Monroe County side and out Redman Road, we see older farmhouses with additions, mobile homes with package units, and acreage homes on well and septic.

Winter in Washtenaw County is the argument for priority scheduling. When a polar vortex stretch settles over Milan and the overnight lows hit single digits, every furnace that was going to fail that year fails in the same week, and every HVAC shop in the area is working through a list. Agreement customers in Milan are at the top of that list. A no-heat call from 48160 on the agreement goes ahead of the routine work, which in a cold snap is usually the difference between the same day and the day after. We cannot promise what the weather does to the board, but we can promise where you sit on it, and for a household with kids, older family members or a house in Hurd Street neighborhood that will freeze its pipes, that is the point.

A lot of the homes we see in Milan are the 1890s–1930s railroad-town homes and 1960s–2000s ranches and colonials that changed hands recently, and the new owners near Wilson Park neighborhood, Platt Road area and the Milan Senior and Community Activity Center usually have the same question: what did I actually buy? Our inspections answer that with a combustion test, a heat exchanger check, refrigerant readings, duct static and a written report. Our service agreement keeps answering it twice a year afterward. The shop is 14 miles away, and maintenance customers in Milan get priority scheduling when the weather turns.

Local details we plan around in Milan

• The Saline River floodplain around Wilson Park has put basements under water in wet springs, and we check for high-water marks on furnace cabinets in that area.
• Milan's municipal water is drawn from wells and is hard, which shows up as sediment in water heaters and scale on humidifier pads.
• The county line runs through town, so permits for a Milan address may go through the City of Milan, Washtenaw County or Monroe County depending on which side of the line the house sits.
• Milan is low, flat and open, in the Saline River bottomland, and summer humidity lingers in the older neighborhoods close to the river. The town is far enough south that it occasionally picks up weather coming off Lake Erie that misses Ypsilanti, including heavier late-winter snow and ice. With little high ground and few windbreaks between the subdivisions and the fields to the south, winter wind drives infiltration on the exposed sides of newer homes.