Columbus, Ohio HVAC contractors: licences, BBB complaints and permit records for the 30 busiest firms

Methodology

Sources

• Permits: City of Columbus Building Permits (open data, ArcGIS), every permit in the “Mechanical” category (the city’s category for heating, cooling and ventilation work) issued from 1 January 2017. Downloaded 1 Nov 2026; the city last edited the data on 31 Oct 2026. 2026 figures run to that date.
• Licences: the Ohio Construction Industry Licensing Board, HVAC contractor roster, downloaded 1 Nov 2026. The roster lists only active licences (status “Active” or “Active In Renewal”). Any licence number can be checked on the state’s licence lookup.
• BBB: each firm’s Better Business Bureau profile and its complaints page, read 1 Nov 2026. We use the count of complaints in the last three years and BBB’s own split into resolved, answered and unresolved. We do not use BBB’s “last 12 months” figure. BBB’s pages show counts for resolved and answered complaints; where those add up to the three-year total, we show 0 unresolved. Where BBB shows the total but no breakdown, the unresolved column is blank. Some BBB profiles cover several locations or brands of a group (the table marks these “shared profile”), so their counts are not for the Columbus firm alone. The accredited-since date is from the profile page’s structured data.
• Google: the firm’s Google Maps listing in Columbus, found by searching its name, with its star rating and review count on 1 Nov 2026. Firms with several branch listings are shown with one listing, named in the firm’s record.

Which firms

The 30 permit applicants with the most Columbus mechanical permits issued since 1 January 2017, after merging name variants. Blank applicant names and placeholders such as “Property Owner” are left out. Nothing else is filtered, so a firm whose main trade is plumbing or fireplaces is included if it filed enough mechanical permits.

Name merging

Applicant names are typed by hand, so one firm appears under several spellings. We merged names that differ only in capitals, punctuation, “&” versus “and”, or a suffix such as LLC, Inc or Co; a “doing business as” name with its legal name; and a few clear variants of the same firm (for example “Atlas Butler” with “Atlas Butler Heating and Cooling”). Each firm’s record lists every name merged and its permit count. We did not merge names that might be a firm renamed, because we could not confirm it: Five Star Heating and Cooling (permits 2021–2024) and Five Star Home Services (from 2023) are shown separately, as are CJS Heating and Air and CJS Systems Heating and Cooling, and the Buckeye names.

Final-inspection rate

The share of a firm’s mechanical permits issued from 1 January 2017 to 31 Oct 2025 whose status is “Final Inspection Approved”. The rest are “Permit Issued” (still open) or “Expired Permit”. Permits from the last year are left out because the work may not be finished. The city median, 82.1%, is the median of this rate across all 135 applicants (after merging) with 100 or more such permits.

Caveat: an open permit can mean paperwork wasn’t closed, not that the work was bad. A permit stays open until someone books the final inspection, and a firm or homeowner may not.

Licence matching

We matched each firm to the roster by company name only. Where the company on the licence differs from the permit name we say so in the firm’s record, with how confident the match is. A firm with no match may hold its licence under another company or a person’s own business name; we do not guess. “Not matched” does not mean unlicensed.

What is not covered

• Disciplinary actions. The licence roster has no discipline field, and we have not searched board orders.
• Service-call fees and prices. Firms’ own sites could not be read automatically.
• Permits outside the City of Columbus (suburbs issue their own) and permits before 2017.
• Reviews on sites other than Google, and complaints filed anywhere but BBB.