Townsend Energy

Townsend Energy is really two businesses under one roof: the oil and propane delivery company that traces through mergers with Federal Energy and, most recently, Petro's New Hampshire accounts, and the HVAC/plumbing service arm that installs heat pumps, furnaces, boilers and water heaters across the North Shore and beyond. The strongest thread across its reviews is emergency response — one technician showed up at 10pm to a flooding, heatless house after already working a 15-hour shift and stayed until it was fixed; another troubleshot and repaired a heating failure the night before a storm and didn't leave until the heat was back on; a 30-year customer describes an 8am oil-tank leak diagnosed and a replacement tank approved within three hours. Named staff show up again and again in the praise, on both the technical and account sides. Scott Beckman is credited more than once with proactively catching a customer's incorrect delivery setup and cutting their per-gallon rate by over a dollar without being asked. On the install side, crews like Jason and Josue, and Chris Fitz and Erick Pineda, get specific praise for explaining the work and finishing tricky jobs — a heat pump and mini-split install, a new water heater, replaced toilet water lines. The company also carries a real, recurring complaint pattern around delivery reliability and billing. In a February 2026 review, a long-time customer says Townsend let their oil tank run empty overnight, leaving an elderly household without heat in 24-degree weather until the next morning. Older reviews describe a similar thread: a customer charged twice, on two different cards, for one delivery in 2023, and long-time customers who say they were quoted well above market rate and left after being refused a price match. A March 2026 review separately flags slow response times and unpleasant dispatchers. Several reviewers draw a distinction between the field technicians, whom they describe as fine, and the office or customer-service side, which they call the weak point. With 334 reviews on file going back to 2022 and a 4.7★ average on Google, the volume of praise outweighs the complaints, but the pattern is specific and recent enough to ask about directly: confirm the account is correctly set up for auto-delivery before winter, and get delivery and pricing commitments in writing if either is a concern.