No heat on a freezing night in New Haven is an emergency — doubly so when a nor'easter is doing its worst off Long Island Sound. This page is triage: what counts as a true emergency, what to check before you call, and what happens when you reach the emergency line. It runs 24/7.
General inquiries: 7 AM–7 PM · Emergency calls: 24/7 · (888) 766-1474
No-heat is not the only one — but it is the most common.
A true emergency is heat lost with temperatures at or near freezing — pipes freeze fast in a New Haven colonial with no circulation, and a multifamily building cooling through the night is a building at risk. Active water damage from the boiler or its piping is an emergency. A gas odor near the equipment is an emergency — but your first call is the gas utility or 911 from outside the building, not a repair line.
What is not an emergency: a boiler that runs but short-cycles, a single cold room, a fault code you can clear, a slow pressure drop, a noisy radiator. Those are diagnosis jobs for the repair page, and calling them in as emergencies slows the queue for the households that are actually freezing.
These fix a surprising share of no-heat calls.
New Haven's signature emergency.
New Haven's emergency season is storm season. A nor'easter off the Sound brings wet snow, heavy gusts, and the power flickers that strand every fuel type: gas ignition needs electricity, oil burners need it more, and controls on both lock out when the power stutters. When the lights come back, some boilers restart and some do not — oil burners can lose prime, gas units can sit in lockout waiting for a reset, and frozen condensate drains finish the job.
If your no-heat follows a storm or an outage, say so first on the call. The triage asks different questions after weather events — whether the building took a surge, whether the venting is buried in a drift, whether the condensate line is frozen — and routes the visit accordingly. Keep the path to the boiler clear of snow and debris before the pro arrives; in Fair Haven and Morris Cove, basement access after a storm is half the battle. For the wider state picture during storm season, the Connecticut hub tracks the same pattern city by city.
Triage first, then dispatch.
The emergency line is answered around the clock. Expect a short round of questions: your ZIP, the fuel type, what the boiler is doing right now (dead, locked out, leaking, making a smell), and whether the building has heat anywhere. Those answers decide priority — a no-heat call near freezing jumps ahead of a noisy radiator, honestly and explicitly.
General inquiries run 7 AM–7 PM; the emergency telephone line never closes. The phone triage itself is free — you will know what happens next before anyone rolls a truck. If you want the mechanics of how this works generally, how it works explains the process start to finish.
Related services and deeper reading.
The national emergency boiler repair page describes how emergency triage works in general terms. If the problem turns out to be fuel-specific once the heat is back on, the gas page and oil page pick up the thread. And if the emergency visit reveals a unit that is done — cracked sections, a dead burner on a decades-old block — the replacement page covers what comes next. For the patterns that say "call now" versus "book a visit," see signs your boiler may need repair.
Straight answers before you call.
Check the thermostat, breaker, and red emergency switch, then try one reset if the unit shows a lockout. If it fires and locks out again, stop resetting and call (888) 766-1474 — emergency triage runs through storms. Keep faucets trickling against frozen pipes while you wait.
No — and that is important to know. Every boiler needs electricity, so a grid outage stops gas and oil units equally; no technician can restart what has no power. Protect the pipes with trickling faucets, wait for restoration, and call only if the boiler fails to restart once power is back.
Shut off the boiler and close the heating system's water feed, then contain the water — a burst radiator valve or split section upstairs becomes a whole-house problem fast. Do not refire until it is repaired and the system is refilled. This is an emergency call.
Leave immediately, do not flip switches or touch the boiler, and call your gas utility's emergency line first. Only after the utility clears the building should the boiler be touched — then call (888) 766-1474 for the heating side. Never restart a boiler yourself after a gas smell.
Document everything — temperatures, times, unanswered calls — and start the triage call anyway; the technician will explain the authorization requirement. Multi-unit no-heat gets priority triage. Tenants in New Haven have heating protections under local housing code, so check the city's guidance on heat complaints as well.
Yes — a boiler that recovers on its own after a nor'easter outage may have an underlying fault the outage merely exposed, like a weak igniter or a control that drops out on voltage dips. Self-recovery is reassuring, not diagnostic. Describe the outage behavior when you call (888) 766-1474 so the visit checks what the storm revealed.
Call (888) 766-1474 now — the emergency line is open 24/7. Describe the symptoms and get triaged.
