Skilled Services Inc

Thirteen written reviews, every one of them five stars, and the same first name keeps surfacing: AJ — Al to some customers — the person who shows up, works out what is actually wrong, and explains it. Skilled Services Inc runs out of Westwood and gets called for the heating-and-cooling jobs a homeowner cannot postpone: a heat pump, a new AC, a boiler swap, a furnace that quit overnight. The sharpest picture of how they work comes from a 2024 review about a tankless water heater. Two other companies had already looked at it, and one wanted to replace the whole system. The customer wrote that the real fault was water clogged in the exhaust pipe throwing an E110 error, and that the repair was adjusting the slope of an elbow joint — no parts replaced at all. The same instinct shows up in another 2024 account, from a customer of three years who said Al would talk him through basic troubleshooting on the phone rather than book a chargeable service call. Money comes up often and never as a complaint. A 2025 reviewer who had a heat pump put in said it landed on time and inside the quote, with no surprises and no hidden costs; another that summer called the price on a heat-pump water heater very reasonable. Google shows 5.0 across 17 ratings. Two things are worth pinning down before you book. The Massachusetts licence confirmed against the state registry is the company's HVAC sheet-metal one, 877-SM-B, and it is active in the company's own name. BuildZoom separately lists a Massachusetts plumbing business licence, number 4598, and notes the expiration date it last saw as May 2024 — worth asking about directly, because BuildZoom's permit history shows most of their recent filings are plumbing and gas fitting, in Taunton, Brookline, Needham, Marshfield, Medfield and Chestnut Hill, typically around $2,500 a job. The other is pace. This is a small operation — nine permits over three years, one new review in the past six months — so it is the shop you call when you want the owner himself on your job, not the one with a fleet and a dispatcher. For a heat pump, a boiler, or a heating fault that needs someone to think before quoting, that trade-off is the whole appeal.