Adams Plumbing & Heating, Inc.

Every review Adams Plumbing & Heating has collected on Google is about its trucks. Four of them, all one star: a professional school bus driver wrote in 2021 about two of the company's drivers cutting off a 30,000-pound bus and tailgating it along the same route; a 2023 reviewer complained about speeding and tailgating; in 2024 someone said they watched a company driver run over a family of ducklings; in 2025 a reviewer said a driver hit their parked car. Seven Google ratings average out to 2.6 stars. Look at what the company actually builds and a different shape appears. This is a commercial and industrial mechanical contractor in Adams, in western Massachusetts — plumbing, HVAC and sheet metal on institutional, municipal and school construction across western and central Massachusetts and southern Vermont. The company says it was founded in 1980 and has been at it 46 years. BuildZoom's permit history matches that scale: 113 permitted projects, roughly 32 of them in the last three years, at a typical permit size near $100,000, and a BuildZoom score of 107 that the site places in the top 6% of 139,240 licensed Massachusetts contractors. Back in 2007 the Berkshire Eagle had the firm among the contractors replacing a 500-foot underground steam pipe on a college campus. The thing worth weighing is a lawsuit. In December 2020 the Berkshire Eagle reported that the UMass Building Authority and UMass-Amherst sued the firm and seven other contractors after kitchen ductwork they installed collapsed within three years. Law-firm write-ups of the 2023 appeal describe the claims — negligence, breach of contract, indemnification over the design and installation of a kitchen exhaust system — being held time-barred under the state's six-year statute of repose. That is a procedural ending, not a ruling on the workmanship, and it is worth asking about directly. On credentials, take the company at its own word and no further. Its site states it is certified as a Woman Business Enterprise by the Massachusetts Supplier Diversity Office, and self-reports a master plumber number and a master sheet metal number; none of that has been checked against a state registry here. BuildZoom separately lists a Plumbing Business licence and a Sheet Metal Business licence for the company, both shown there as active, and the BBB — where the profile is unaccredited and carries no rating at all — has seven Department of Public Safety numbers on file. The Amherst Bulletin reported in 2023 that a general contractor named the firm among trade partners it credited for a commitment to women in the workforce. For a facilities manager bidding a school, a municipal building or a campus plant, this is a plausible name with the permit history to back it. For a homeowner with a burst pipe, it is not the shop to call — and if a company truck is going to be on your road either way, the driving complaints are the part of this profile people actually wrote about.