Water Heater Repair in Romulus, Michigan

If you are standing in a Romulus basement looking at water around the base of the heater, here is what to do before you read further: turn the cold supply valve on top of the tank off, turn the gas knob to pilot, and call us. From there, Temprasure sorts out whether the water is condensation, a relief valve, a fitting or the tank, which is a thirty-second decision for Al and the difference between a small repair and a replacement in your 1940s–70s ranches and bungalows built around the airport home. Romulus is roughly 22 minutes from the shop, and leaking-tank calls go to the front of the line.

Romulus houses and what that means for water heater repair

Romulus homes are small, old and spread out, which makes for a specific kind of HVAC work. The 1940s and 50s houses along Wick, Ecorse and Beverly Roads are frame bungalows and ranches on crawlspaces or shallow block basements, many of them originally heated with oil or coal and converted to gas forced air sometime in the 60s or 70s. The 1960s and 70s ranches on the south side near Pennsylvania and Eureka Roads have slightly larger systems but the same tight utility closets and single-return duct layouts. A lot of these houses have had additions, enclosed porches and garages converted into rooms, and the furnace was rarely resized. Central air was almost never original, so condensers are add-ons from the 80s through the 2000s on circuits that were not planned for them. We find a lot of furnaces well past 25 years here, patched repeatedly, and a lot of houses where honest repair makes more sense than replacement.

The chimney is the hidden half of a water heater problem in older Romulus homes. In the 1940s–70s ranches and bungalows built around the airport houses around Merriman Road's hotel row, the water heater shares a masonry flue with the furnace, and when the furnace was replaced with a high-efficiency unit that vents out the side wall, the water heater was left alone on a chimney far too big for it. The flue gases cool, condense and drip acidic water back into the draft hood, the pilot gets wet and goes out, and the thermocouple gets blamed. On a Romulus repair we check draft at the hood and look for spillage and staining before replacing parts, because the fix for an orphaned water heater is a chimney liner or a different venting approach, not a third thermocouple.

Romulus is close enough to our shop, about 22 minutes, that a leaking tank reported in the morning is usually replaced by evening. We know the mechanical rooms in the 1940s–70s ranches and bungalows built around the airport around Romulus Historical Park area and Pennsylvania Road: tight corners, old shutoffs that will not quite close, flues shared with a furnace that was replaced years ago. That last one matters, because a high-efficiency furnace that abandoned a chimney leaves the water heater venting alone into a flue that is now too big for it. We check draft on every Romulus water heater call for exactly that reason.

Local details we plan around in Romulus

• Romulus water is from the Detroit system and is relatively soft, so water heater sediment is a smaller issue than the age of the tanks themselves.
• Houses that were converted from oil heat sometimes still have an abandoned tank in the basement or yard that affects where a new furnace can go.
• Jet-fuel particulates and runway dust load up furnace filters and condenser coils faster near the airport than elsewhere in our radius.
• Romulus is as flat as it gets in Wayne County, which is why the airport is here. The open runways and the cleared land around them let wind sweep across the neighborhoods in winter, and the acres of pavement and jet exhaust make summer afternoons a few degrees hotter than Belleville or Van Buren. Drainage is poor on the clay soil, so basements and crawlspaces near the Lower Rouge and the airport's drainage ditches stay damp well into summer.