Heating and Cooling in Detroit, MI

The typical Detroit home was built in 1947

Detroit did its building early. By Census Bureau estimates the typical home here is about twenty years older than the typical home across Metro Detroit as a whole, and homes from before 1940 are nearly three times as common. Fewer than one in twenty has gone up since 2000. Just under two-thirds are detached houses. The rest are mostly attached homes, two-family houses and apartments.

Maverick Heating and Cooling is a family-owned business, 7 years old, and there are four on the crew. We serve every city within 50 miles of Dearborn Heights, and that means every part of Detroit. You get a time and we keep it. You hear the problem, the choices and the price before any work starts, and the finished job is 100% satisfaction guaranteed. Call 248-930-2080 for work in Detroit or in neighboring Dearborn or Southfield.

Detroit's pre-war houses were built for heat, not cooling

In Detroit's pre-1940 houses, the furnace is usually the newest part of the heating system. A furnace typically lasts 15 to 20 years, so the one there now is almost certainly not the first. Where those houses have ducts, they were generally laid out for heat alone, long before central air was common, and the chimney is often as old as the house. So before replacing a furnace or adding cooling, we look at what the ducts can carry and how the equipment vents.

Two-family houses and electric heat

Detroit still has two-family houses, though far fewer than it once did. Where each unit has its own furnace and water heater, there are two of everything to keep running. About one Detroit home in six heats with electricity from DTE Electric, against about one in nine across Metro Detroit. That can mean heaters along the baseboards, an electric furnace or a heat pump. We work on electric furnaces and heat pumps as well as gas equipment.

Combined sewers and basements that back up

Most Detroit neighborhoods have combined sewers: storm water and sewage share one pipe, and in the heaviest rain it can back up into basements. The City's Basement Backup and Flooding Handbook tops its list of single-day rains with 5.77 inches on June 26, 2021 and 4.57 inches on August 11, 2014. Both were followed by presidential major disaster declarations.

The same handbook lists damage to the furnace and hot water tank among the results of a flooded basement and advises homeowners to elevate them. The City's Basement Backup Protection Program covers 11 neighborhoods with a record of backups. Its first phase put 382 backwater valves into Victoria Park and Aviation Sub and finished in September 2023. If your furnace or water heater is being replaced anyway, ask us whether the new one can sit higher off the floor.