Peterson Oil Service

Peterson Oil Service is a Worcester heating-oil and HVAC company that says on its website it was founded in 1946 and remains family-owned. It delivers heating oil, installs and services heating and cooling equipment, and also offers plumbing. Reviews from the last several years are dominated by frustration with the office side of the business — scheduling, billing, and phone support — even as the technicians who actually show up at the house are repeatedly praised by name. A 2025 review described Rick and Kenny swapping out an old oil tank and even routing new piping through a shed roof, sealing it up cleanly; another from 2024 singled out a technician named Jay for a thorough, pleasant burner cleaning. Customers who've stayed with Peterson for years — one for 18 years, another since the early 1990s — describe consistently good service. But a much longer run of reviews across the same period describes rude or unhelpful phone staff, oil deliveries that didn't show up as promised, and an auto-pay system that skipped a payment and then billed two months at once. Two separate reviews, from January 2026 and March 2026, describe Peterson delivery trucks nearly causing accidents on the road. And a 2024 review referenced a class-action settlement the company paid out over oil quality the reviewer said damaged their fuel pumps and tank — a similar complaint about product or installation quality appears in other reviews about tank work gone wrong. The Better Business Bureau gives the company a B rating without accreditation and records two complaints against it for failure to respond. For the actual mechanical work — a tank swap, a burner service call — the technician-level reviews here are strong. But the surrounding experience of ordering oil, getting billed, and reaching someone by phone has generated a heavy and consistent run of complaints across the last several years; anyone considering Peterson should go in with clear expectations about delivery timing and billing, and keep a paper trail.