I called and requested service because I had observed darker smoke venting from our chimney. Company contact, Ms. Holt, suggested it might be a blocked boiler, and advised that the cost of service for that would be $400. Later that day the service technician came to the house to service the boiler. He was here for about two hours, and left claiming he had cleaned and unblocked the boiler ("brushed and vacuumed"), and also installed a new nozzle on the boiler. I paid him $400 by check. By early the next morning, the basement was filled with a pungent and pervasive odor of oil soot and boiler fumes. Whatever it was he did, the "service" had actually made the problem worse. Technician returned later the second day. He again replaced the nozzle. But, he said he was puzzled about the cause of the continued fumes and smell and dark smoke venting, and recommend that chimney sweep be brought in for cleaning inspection. After a mid-winter night without heat, we called a chimney sweep the next morning. He came and inspected and cleaned the chimney, but reported there was NO obstruction, there was good draft, and also that (in his opinion) the odor was NOT a chimney problem but a boiler problem. I called Hometown Heating twice on the third day to report the results of the chimney inspection, and requesting a further service call. Hometown Heating never returned my calls.Finally, I called a different boiler technician who responded by coming to the house to inspect and service the boiler. Upon examining the boiler, he found that in fact it had NOT been cleaned at all--not brushed and vacuumed--and that it was still plugged, and that there was no evidence that the Hometown Heating tech had actually performed the work for which the company was paid $400. The new technician DID perform a meticulous cleaning of the boiler, actually brushing and vacuuming it, and, not surprisingly, it started functioning well. After the new technician left, we have had NO fumes, no dark smoke from the chimney, no new odors permeating the house. The boiler has run perfectly since that non-Hometown service call 8 months ago. So, the Hometown tech either did not do the work he was paid for, or did it so incompetently and negligently that the result was the same as if he had not done it at all. His second service call was entirely unnecessary (as he most certainly must have known). Moreover, as a result of his negligence or incompetence, we had to pay $229 to have our chimney unnecessarily inspected and cleaned. On top of that, we had to hire another boiler technician to properly service the boiler. Finally, because of the strong and persistent odor of oil fumes and soot in the basement, we had to hire Enviro-vantage to come to our home to do odor mitigation and soot cleanup in the basement. I stopped payment on the check I had given the tech. I tried repeatedly by phone, email and U.S. mail to get some response from the company. But, never heard from them again. They never came looking for the funds from the check I cancelled (a pretty obvious admission of guilt), but also never took any interest in correcting their mistake, apologizing for their shoddy work, or compensating us for the additional costs. We had relied for several years on this company for annual preventative "maintenance" of our 2006 boiler, which they had installed when the house was owned by others. The most recent previous service had been only five months before these problems arose. So, I suspect that we had paid then for service that was also never done (or never done correctly).Avoid using this company; they are liars and thieves.