Keating Plumbing & Heating

Keating Plumbing & Heating works out of 126 Main St in Marlborough and covers plumbing, heating, cooling and indoor air quality across the Monadnock region. The company holds New Hampshire mechanical business entity licence MBE0000084, verified active against the state's OPLC registry, and the Better Business Bureau lists it as accredited with an A+ grade. Its Google profile shows 4.4 stars from 150 ratings across 103 reviews going back to 2021. The emergency stories are the ones that stand out. A household that lost water pressure on a Monday night with a four-week-old baby had Peter there the next day; he stayed late and a colleague drove a second failed part down from Keene at 7pm so the family had running water that night. On a Sunday morning after an ice storm another customer found a puddle under the boiler and got a callback from the 24-hour line within minutes. When a furnace could not keep up at minus seven degrees, a technician had it running the same morning. One customer whose own propane company told her to wait until spring had a technician out that afternoon. Mini-splits are the big installed product — Mitsubishi systems including a two-zone in an old Cape done between 7:30am and 2:30pm, a Hyperheat system with a unit in every room, and installs where crews built a platform for a condenser on a steep slope or cut through a crawl space to reach the compressor. On the plumbing side reviewers describe an old built-in cast iron pipe replaced with only the necessary demolition, toilets, water filters, sump pumps and drains cleared, and a propane-to-electric conversion handled end to end with the office walking the homeowner through the financing. The complaints are consistent and they are about billing. A 2023 customer was charged a $140 trip fee plus $329 for under two hours of work; a 2024 customer was charged around $260 on top of a $149 dispatch fee for what he says amounted to turning a mixing valve; a 2022 customer paid roughly three times other quotes for a water heater, then found cut pipe left behind and the old tank dropped in the basement walkway; and a contractor posting in 2022 said a bathroom hookup for his 76-year-old customer came to over $1,500. A March 2026 caller charged a call-out fee after fixing the problem himself had it refunded by a manager and raised his review to five stars. Two older accounts are more serious: a June 2025 reviewer says negligent work caused thousands of dollars of lasting damage and was met with a discount rather than responsibility, and a 2024 reviewer describes a heat pump that never worked properly across four years with calls that were not returned. A capable, well-staffed shop that turns up when the heat or water is gone. Ask for the trip fee, the hourly rate and the likely total in writing before the van is dispatched.