Howard Plumbing

Howard Plumbing works out of Daytona Road in Lynn, and its trail is a long run of small jobs: 32 permits pulled across Topsfield, Beverly, Danvers and Peabody between 2016 and 2022, most valued under $6,500. Run down that list and the shape of the business is obvious — water heater and toilet replacements, dishwasher and cook-stove hookups, gas piping to a furnace, a boiler and a backflow preventer, plumbing for bathroom remodels, and one outlier at $65,000 for a mobile-home lot. Everyday residential plumbing and gas fitting, not big-project work. Two things to sort out before hiring. Nobody has written about the work: BuildZoom states it has received no customer reviews for the business, so there is no homeowner account of how any of these jobs went. And BuildZoom's licence panel is an odd one — it reads 'License Not Required' and says the site verified in April 2022 that this contractor does not need a licence to work as a plumber in Massachusetts. Ask him directly for his plumbing licence number and check it against the state registry yourself. A sensible call for a water heater, a gas appliance hookup, or the plumbing side of a bathroom job on the North Shore. Ask for two or three recent local addresses, since the permits on file stop in 2022.