Alewife Air

Sixty-four permits, and the most recent one was filed in November 2024. Alewife Air is a three-person shop on Otis Street in Somerville that David Marujo has run since January 2001, and its permit file is almost entirely one kind of work: forced hot air furnaces, central air, hydro-air and ducted mini splits, with the sheet metal fabricated and the ductwork run by the same crew — in Somerville, Cambridge, Brookline, Malden, Milton, Arlington, Beverly and Chestnut Hill. The written customer record is dated. Three reviews, all from 2014 and 2015, averaging 4 out of 5 on BuildZoom. Two are warm: a March 2015 customer said the bid came in lowest of four and called the furnace installation neat, and a September 2014 one called them the most honest HVAC people they had dealt with. The third, from August 2015, is the one to read — a homeowner on an $8,400 whole-system job wrote that the work was left unfinished and that they had to hire another contractor to fix the system. The company posted a rebuttal underneath it. Two things to settle before calling. BuildZoom could not verify a licence for the business and prints "No active license on file" on its profile — that is the directory's finding rather than the state's, so ask for the number and check it against the registry yourself. And the permit trail has gone quiet: one permitted project in the past two years, against a steady run through the 2010s. On the other side of the ledger, the BBB grades the business A+ and lists a one-year labour warranty on its own work plus the manufacturers' warranties on the equipment. If you want an installer who fabricates and runs its own ductwork rather than subbing it out, this is that kind of shop — get the licence confirmed first, and ask what they have been installing lately.