P. R. Douglas Co., Inc

P. R. Douglas Co. is a small heating and air-conditioning company on Calvary Street in Waltham. Its own site carries the tagline 'Quality HVAC Service Since 1979' and says Paul Douglas started the business out of his parents' garage that year; it now runs five service vehicles and one box truck fitted out for boiler installations and larger jobs. Paul, Scott and Cheryl Douglas are the named contacts. Read this one thing first: the company's own Contact page states in capitals that it is NOT currently accepting new customers. Directories still list it as bookable, so a homeowner should check that before planning around it. The work is heating-led. The site lists full installation and service for oil and gas boilers, oil and gas furnaces, air conditioning units, heat pumps, ductless split units and water heaters, plus radiant floor heating and venting terminations, and the Better Business Bureau adds oil burner service and repair or replacement of oil tanks. BuildZoom's permit record — 283 permitted projects — shows the same pattern in practice: gas water heaters, a gas-fired steam boiler, furnaces and sheet-metal venting in Waltham, Belmont, Maynard and Lexington. Credential-wise, the state registry verifies a Massachusetts sheet metal business licence, number 339-SM-B, active and held in this company's own name. That is the one licence that can be stated plainly. BuildZoom separately prints a bundle of ten or so records that contradict each other — the same numbers appearing both Active at state level and cancelled under the City of Newton, one marked Active while carrying a 2012 expiry, another not verified since 2010 — so treat everything in that bundle as a directory claim to check with the state, not as a credential. Customer feedback is positive but thin: Google shows 4.8 stars from 12 ratings, and only five review bodies are on file, all from 2023 and 2024. They describe quick call-backs, visits at the customer's convenience, and one case in 2023 where the company found a recurring fault another HVAC firm had missed. There is nothing more recent, so this read rests on a small and now dated sample. One thing to raise directly with them: an aggregator of U.S. Department of Labor enforcement records reports that a company of this name was the subject of a formal OSHA inspection producing two citations and $3,300 in proposed penalties. That line is undated in what we can see and comes from a third-party aggregator rather than the agency itself, so it should be confirmed rather than assumed.