We surveyed 428 Ontario HVAC contractors. Here's what we found.
Original data on shop size, software adoption and web presence across 8 Ontario cities.
Fieldwork 2026-07-31 · 428 businesses · published Aug 5, 2026
RingBook AI surveyed 428 HVAC contractors across 8 Ontario cities in 2026-07. 46 of them (11%) showed a detectable major field-service platform on their public website; the median shop had 63 Google reviews.
The market is overwhelmingly small independents
The median shop in our sample had 63 Google reviews. 277 of the 411 rated businesses (67%) had fewer than 150. That's the shape of the Ontario HVAC market: a small number of large, heavily-reviewed operations and a very long tail of owner-run shops with a few trucks.
It matters for call handling because those are precisely the businesses with nobody sitting at a desk. In a three-truck shop the phone rings to somebody who is currently under a furnace.
Field-service software adoption is lower than vendors imply
We checked each business's public website for fingerprints of the major field-service platforms. 46 of 428 showed one:
| Platform | Detected | Share of sample |
|---|---|---|
| ServiceTitan | 21 | 5% |
| HousecallPro | 18 | 4% |
| Jobber | 6 | 1% |
| Workiz | 1 | 0% |
| None detected | 382 | 89% |
Read this one carefully. "None detected" means our fingerprint check found no trace of these platforms on the business's public website. It does not mean the shop runs no software — plenty of platforms leave no public footprint, and a shop can run one without it touching the marketing site. The honest claim is about detectability, not adoption. We'd rather state a narrower true thing than a broader one we can't stand behind.
By city
| City | Surveyed | Platform detected | Median reviews |
|---|---|---|---|
| London | 61 | 8 (13%) | 72 |
| Windsor | 56 | 3 (5%) | 30 |
| Kitchener | 49 | 3 (6%) | 41 |
| St. Catharines | 47 | 5 (11%) | 18 |
| Oshawa | 46 | 1 (2%) | 52 |
| Hamilton | 45 | 7 (16%) | 93 |
| Guelph | 40 | 4 (10%) | 36 |
| Barrie | 35 | 7 (20%) | 106 |
Cities with fewer than 20 businesses in the sample don't get their own page — the sample is too small to say anything useful about the local market.
91% have a website
390 of 428 businesses had a website listed. The 38 without one are running entirely on Google Business Profile, referrals and the phone — which makes the phone the only channel they have.
What we deliberately have not measured yet
The obvious question is what happens when you actually call these shops after hours. We've built the survey to hold that field and we have not run it — every record currently reads not_tested.
We're not going to quote you a number about missed calls until we've measured it ourselves. When we do run it, it'll be observational: call, record whether a human answers, voicemail picks up, or it rings out, and hang up. No message, no pitch, nobody's time wasted. The results and the raw method will be published here.
Method
Businesses were pulled from the Google Places API on 2026-07-31 using HVAC-related queries across 8 Ontario cities, deduplicated by phone and business name. Each record was then enriched by fetching the business's own public website. Platform detection is fingerprint-based on that public site. Full detail on the methodology page.
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