Alvin Hollis

Alvin Hollis has been fixing heat and hot water problems on the South Shore since 1871, and the company says it's still run by the same family, now five generations in, out of South Weymouth. People call them for the things that can't wait — a leaking oil tank, a dead furnace mid-cold-snap, a boiler on its last legs — and the number of ratings backing that up is deep: 4.6 stars on Google from 249 ratings, matched closely on Birdeye (370 reviews) and HVAC Firms (242 reviews), plus an A+ rating and BBB accreditation dating to 2003. The last six months read like a typical stretch for them. A 35-year customer found a puddle under a 50-year-old oil tank, had someone out the next day, and had a new tank in within a couple of days. Another customer's six-month standoff with Carrier over a warranty claim got settled in under 30 days once Jim's team stepped in. Furnace and baseboard-heat jobs from the same period describe crews finishing on time and cleaning up after themselves, the same pattern showing up again and again across a company with over a hundred reviews on file since 2021. Not everything in that window was clean. One March 2026 review describes smoke coming from a chimney, a slow first response, and — afterward — the company saying it couldn't find the reviewer as a past customer, which the reviewer read as a move to discredit a bad review. It's an outlier against the five-star volume, but specific and recent enough to flag. A second, older pattern is worth knowing too: more than one customer singles out a manager, Jim Bicknell, for rude or dismissive phone calls, even while praising the technicians who actually did the work. Ratings aren't unanimous everywhere — a Yahoo listing shows 3.5 stars from 63 reviews, notably below the 4.6 seen elsewhere, so it's worth checking more than one source. For an oil-heat customer, or anyone with an aging furnace, boiler, or water heater, the history here is long enough to trust for the core mechanical work. Before booking, it's worth asking directly how billing or account disputes get handled by phone — that's where the complaints cluster, not the technical side of the job.