Callahan A/C & Heating Services

Callahan is the rare small HVAC shop with a paper trail: 92 permits on file, a Massachusetts sheet-metal business licence that is verified active with the state, a BuildZoom score placing it in the top 10% of Massachusetts contractors, and an A+ letter grade from the Better Business Bureau. It is also the rare shop whose 4.2-star Google average, across 42 ratings, is genuinely earned in both directions. The company works out of 91 Belmont Street in North Andover and says it has been doing full-service heating, ventilation, air conditioning and plumbing for homes and businesses since 1990, with a second office in Moultonborough, New Hampshire covering the Lakes Region. It presents itself as an independent dealer rather than a single-brand outfit, its BBB listing names Kate Callahan as president with 20 employees, and its team page names several Callahans — a genuine family shop rather than a roll-up. The permit record backs the trade claim: multi-zone forced hot air and central air installations, heat pumps with energy-recovery ventilation, furnace replacements and gas work, plus two commercial boiler projects, with a typical permit around $22,650. When the work goes well, reviewers are emphatic about two things: price and problem-solving. Repeatedly, homeowners who collected three or four quotes say Callahan came in lowest without proposing unnecessary work, and several credit its technicians with fixing systems that other companies had failed on for years. A recent reviewer describes a Mitsubishi heat pump installed with new ductwork to every room in two days, correctly sized after three competing quotes, at the lowest price of the three, with the crawl space left clean. The other side of the record is serious and it is not old news. A cluster of one- and two-star accounts, most from the past two years, describes the same shapes: systems that stopped working within a few years of installation, repeat visits that were billed without resolving the fault, a diagnosis a customer says was expensive and unnecessary, and property damage a customer attributes to a service visit. In the resolved-versus-unresolved column, these read as unresolved. Its written record also thinned sharply in the past six months. So hire deliberately here. The licensing is real, the pricing genuinely tends to come in low, and the installation reviews are strong and specific — but get the scope and diagnosis in writing, ask what happens if the same fault recurs and whether follow-up visits are billed, get a second opinion before authorizing any large repair, and after any service visit check that the equipment and its condensate pump are actually running before the technician leaves.