Hot & Cold Plumbing & Heating LLC

When frozen pipes burst at a customer's office during a deep freeze in 2023 and hundreds of gallons of water went into the basement, the owner turned up, found the break and repaired it fast enough that the business did not lose a single day of work. That review says the most about Hot & Cold: this is a two-person operation where the man who answers the phone is the man under the sink. His name is Eric Watson, and reviewers name him personally in nearly every one of the fourteen written reviews on file, running from 2022 to this summer. The Better Business Bureau lists him as the manager, records the business as having started in August 2009, and grades the page A+ — though the business is not BBB accredited. Google carries a 4.9 from 38 ratings. The work runs from single fixtures to whole systems. A 2025 customer had every pipe in the house replaced along with new showers, a tub, bathroom vanities and a dryer vent. Another that year described a bathroom brought up to date — floor, vanity and toilet — in an afternoon, at a price they called reasonable. A July 2026 reviewer had a new water heater in and running in half a day. One 2025 customer was mainly impressed that a 2-in-1 washer/dryer got hooked up in a space nobody thought would take it, without looking cramped. Two things are worth checking before booking, and both are paperwork rather than workmanship. The company publishes three licence numbers itself — a Massachusetts master plumber number and two New Hampshire ones — and none was confirmed against a state registry here, so ask to see them. More pointedly, the tenure does not add up: the site's headline claims 25+ years of local service while the same pages advertise over 50 years of experience, and the BBB has the business starting in August 2009, which is seventeen. Each could have a defensible explanation — an owner's own career is not the same as the company's age — but they cannot all be describing one thing. Its own site also gives a Reading contact address while the BBB file sits at a Haverhill street address, and BBB records the entity as a sole proprietorship although it trades as an LLC. The company says it covers 41 towns across northeastern Massachusetts and southern New Hampshire, Middleton among them, and advertises around-the-clock emergency service. For a burst pipe, a dead water heater, or a bathroom brought back to life by one experienced pair of hands, this is a straightforward call — just pin down the licence numbers and what an after-hours visit costs.