Water Heater Installation in Ann Arbor, Michigan

When a water heater fails in Ann Arbor, the replacement usually cannot wait for a convenient week. Temprasure keeps the 40- and 50-gallon gas tanks that most Washtenaw County basements use available, and a call from 48103 in the morning is often a new heater running by afternoon. We are about 16 minutes from Ann Arbor, the estimate is free, the price is one flat number that includes the permit, the new connectors, the expansion tank where the house needs one and the haul-away of the old tank. For the pre-war two-stories and 1950s–60s ranches, with university-era infill on every side homes around Old Fourth Ward, we also check the chimney and the gas line before assuming the new tank can simply go where the old one was.

Ann Arbor houses and what that means for water heater replacement

Ann Arbor gives us almost every housing type in one zip code. The Old West Side and Old Fourth Ward are full of 1880s–1920s frame houses with stone or rubble foundations, fieldstone basements that stay damp, and furnaces that replaced boilers or gravity units sometime in the 1960s or 70s. Many of those homes still have cast-iron radiators fed by a boiler, and a surprising number have both a boiler and a separate forced-air system added for cooling. Burns Park and Ann Arbor Hills houses are larger 1920s–50s builds with plaster walls, so getting a second return or a bigger supply trunk in is slow work. The ranches and split-levels of the west side were built with 80,000 to 100,000 BTU furnaces that are now oversized for insulated versions of the same house. Condos near Briarwood and Pittsfield Village often have furnaces in closets or attics with tight clearances. Student rentals near campus run the oldest equipment in the city, and landlords routinely call us for emergency service and new-purchase inspections.

Water quality in Ann Arbor is the reason we talk about anode rods and tankless honestly. The municipal water in town and the well water in the rural parts of Washtenaw County are both hard, and some of the wells around Old Fourth Ward carry enough iron that a magnesium anode produces a sulfur smell within months. On a new tank we can install an aluminum-zinc or powered anode where that is a known issue, and we tell customers when to have the rod checked so the tank reaches fifteen years instead of ten. For tankless, we are straightforward: on Ann Arbor water it needs annual descaling, and a house with a half-inch gas line and a pre-war two-stories and 1950s–60s ranches, with university-era infill on every side meter is not a cheap conversion. Some homes are great candidates and some are not, and we say which.

Water heaters in Ann Arbor fail the way they fail everywhere in Washtenaw County: quietly for years, then all at once on a weekday morning. The pre-war two-stories and 1950s–60s ranches, with university-era infill on every side around Ann Arbor Hills and Old Fourth Ward mostly have 40- or 50-gallon atmospheric gas tanks on DTE Energy service, often in a basement near a sump pit where a leak goes unnoticed until the floor is wet. We are 16 minutes from 48103 with thermocouples, gas valves, elements, thermostats and relief valves on the truck, and when the tank itself is done we replace it the same day whenever a unit is in stock.

Local details we plan around in Ann Arbor

• Ann Arbor has its own building department with its own mechanical permit process, and inspectors here want to see combustion air, condensate routing and flue sizing done by the book.
• Fieldstone foundations in the oldest neighborhoods sweat enough that furnace cabinets and water heater bases corrode early unless they sit on blocks or a pad.
• The large number of boiler-and-radiator homes means we see hydronic work here far more than anywhere else in our radius.
• The Huron River cuts a deep valley through the north side of Ann Arbor, and the Northside, Lower Town and Gallup Park neighborhoods feel it as morning fog, heavier dew and basements that sweat in July. The downtown core holds heat with all its brick and pavement, so attics and upper floors there run several degrees hotter than the leafy blocks of Burns Park and the Old West Side, where mature oaks and maples shade roofs and cut peak cooling loads noticeably.