Tim, who owns Only Water Heaters, says most people shopping for a water heater have “two different questions: how much, and when can you do it?”
His company is organized around the second one. In the Columbus area, Tim says, it can have a water heater installed in as little as two hours. The company’s installation pages make a matching claim: any water heater, delivered within two hours of the order.
The speed comes from what the company leaves out. “The only thing we do is water heaters,” Tim says. “We don’t do anything else.” Customers, he says, want someone who does that one thing, and they feel more comfortable that the people at the door know what they’re doing.
For the crew, that means a narrower day. “Our vehicles are stocked with the water heaters. We have them at our shop,” he says. “We don’t have to have our guys concentrating on doing plumbing, electric, HVAC. We just specifically do water heaters.” He says the focus makes the company much more efficient. Technicians arrive with the parts for a repair or a replacement and can finish on the spot, the company says on its home page.
Narrow doesn’t mean small. Tim says the company handles any water heater of any size, from small portable on-demand units up to redundant systems for hospitals and industrial sites. Its commercial pages name the kinds of places that need larger, more rugged units: restaurants, hotels, schools, bars and laundromats.
The business dates to the mid-1980s. Tim calls it partially family-owned and says he is the second generation; he has run it since the mid-2000s and has no partners. Most of the technicians have been with him a while, he says. “They all know our protocol, and it’s just followed on every job,” he says. “We don’t take shortcuts.”
He does not promise a perfect schedule. The company tries to hold its appointment times, he says, and if something changes, it tells the customer. “We may be early, we may be late,” he says. One customer who wrote about an install noticed that the crew laid drop cloths from the front door to the basement without being asked.
Most of the work falls within 50 or 60 miles of Columbus. Tim says the company has worked all over Ohio, including Dayton and Cincinnati, though it concentrates on the Columbus area. It advertises same-day installation 365 days a year, and its listed hours run around the clock.
The urgency, Tim says, comes with the product. “A lot of people that have a need for a water heater aren’t willing to wait,” he says. Then he runs through why. “Leaking, or they feel uncomfortable that it might be dangerous. It’s doing property damage. There’s a lot of different variables.”