Oakland County
Furnace Repair in Berkley, MI
Just up Coolidge and Twelve Mile from Nine Mile.
Berkley is a small city of mostly modest single-family houses from the 1940s and 1950s, and one pattern comes up over and over: the dormer. An enormous number of Berkley bungalows were expanded upward at some point, turning attic space into bedrooms. The heating system almost never got resized when that happened. So the winter complaint we hear from Berkley is rarely no heat at all. It is that the upstairs sits ten degrees behind the rest of the house, which is a distribution question before it is a furnace question.
What we run into in Berkley heating systems
- Dormered and half-storey bungalows are the signature Berkley layout, and the upstairs is usually served by a single long duct run added after the fact.
- Basement furnaces here are often in partly finished rooms, where a return was walled over during a remodel and the system has been starved for air ever since.
- Compact postwar floor plans mean short duct runs downstairs and very long ones upstairs, so balancing matters more than raw furnace size.
Getting someone out
For a no-heat emergency, ring (248) 398-4015 rather than using the form. That line runs 24 hours. Scheduled work, including anything that can wait until the morning, runs Mon–Fri 8am–5pm out of the shop at 1880 E Nine Mile Rd, Ferndale, MI 48220.
It helps to know what you have before anyone arrives. The age of the unit, the brand on the front, and whether it is doing nothing at all or doing something wrong will usually narrow the problem down over the phone.
This page covers what is particular about Berkley. For how the work itself goes, what tends to fail, and the repair-or-replace question, see furnace repair.
Furnace Repair in Berkley: questions we get
The upstairs of my Berkley bungalow never gets warm. Is the furnace failing?
Usually not. When an attic was finished into bedrooms, the duct system was designed for a house that did not have that floor, and the upstairs is typically fed by one long run added afterwards. The furnace can be in good condition and that floor will still run cold. The first thing worth checking is the supply and return serving the upstairs rather than the furnace itself.
How long does a gas furnace last?
Most residential gas furnaces run fifteen to twenty years. Units that were correctly sized, vented properly, and had their filters changed regularly reach the top of that range and sometimes pass it. Units that were oversized for the house tend to short cycle their whole lives and wear out earlier.
Why does my furnace keep turning on and off?
Short cycling has a handful of usual causes. A filter that has not been changed in a season is the most common and the cheapest. After that, a dirty flame sensor, a failing high-limit switch, a blocked or partly blocked flue, or a furnace that was simply sized too large for the house. The pattern of how long it runs before dropping out narrows it down quickly.