No heat with Philadelphia January nights in the teens and low 20s, water pouring from the boiler, or a unit that keeps locking out. Call any time. The emergency telephone line is available 24/7 — and in a city of attached rowhouses, freeze-risk calls jump the queue, because one burst pipe becomes the whole block's problem.
General inquiries: 7 AM–7 PM · Emergency calls: 24/7 · (888) 766-1474
Gas city, rowhouse freeze math.
Say ‘steam’ or ‘oil’ immediately if that is you; it switches the entire decision tree. Then what failed, the error code or its absence, and the indoor temperature trend.
The Philadelphia-specific question is attached housing: rowhouses share walls but freeze independently, and a burst pipe in one unit floods the neighbor. Freeze-risk calls in attached housing carry extra priority weight — tell the triage if you share walls, and give your ZIP for the coverage check.
Philadelphia January nights sit in the teens and low 20s. Use these lines.
Think about the neighbors, too.
Rowhouse freeze protection is a team sport: open cabinet doors on exterior walls, drip taps, and tell the attached neighbor — if your pipes go, their basement may be next. Keep basement doors open where you safely can so residual heat reaches pipe chases. Note the error code — or the failure behavior, on units with no display — before calling.
Do not keep resetting a locked-out boiler, and do not open the casing. One reset to observe; then let the triage set priority with real information.
Do this before you call.
Call with fuel type, gauge reading, error behavior, and whether you share walls — the triage prioritizes correctly in under a minute.
When your emergency is the block's emergency.
In a Philadelphia rowhouse, a heating emergency is never private. A burst pipe in your walls floods the attached neighbor's basement. A gas leak evacuates both sides of the party wall. A chimney problem can spill CO next door. The triage knows this — which is why ‘I share walls’ changes your priority.
The protocol: tell the neighbor immediately (knock, don't text — this is urgent), kill the water at the main if pipes burst, and for gas, get everyone out before calling PECO — don't assume the neighbor smells what you smell. After the emergency passes, the follow-up conversation is often a shared one: party-wall chimneys, shared flues, and adjacent basements mean the permanent fix sometimes spans property lines.
Straight answers before you call.
Urgent — no heat near freezing is the top of the emergency triage, and the line runs around the clock at (888) 766-1474. Rowhouses add a wrinkle: frozen pipes can affect the shared wall next door, so attached housing gets weighed seriously. Say no heat, your fuel, and your ZIP, and you will be routed by urgency, not by hold time.
They can. A burst pipe in a rowhouse does not respect property lines, and a boiler leak on a shared wall is your neighbor's problem too. That is why the triage asks about attached housing — it changes both the urgency and the advice while you wait. If water is involved, telling the neighbor is part of the emergency, not an afterthought.
Out of the house first, then the gas utility or 911 from outside — no switches, no investigating. The utility has to clear the house before any boiler work happens. After the all-clear, call (888) 766-1474 about the boiler. We do not triage suspected gas leaks over the phone; the utility owns that step.
Get everyone outside and call 911 — every CO alarm is treated as real until the fire department says otherwise. Do not silence it and go back to sleep, and do not reset the boiler. Once the house is cleared, the boiler gets a full inspection before it fires again; call (888) 766-1474 and say carbon monoxide so the triage understands the history.
Shut the boiler's power switch off and call the emergency line — surging water levels and spitting vents mean the system is not operating safely, and running it hard can damage the boiler. Do not keep adding water trying to fix the level; overfilling makes surging worse. Steam emergencies have their own playbook, so say steam first when you call.
Related services in the Philadelphia area.
Once the immediate crisis is handled, most emergencies land on one of these pages. If the boiler runs but misbehaves, the general repair page covers diagnosis without the emergency framing. Fuel-specific follow-up lives on the gas boiler page for the mainstream or the oil boiler page for the rare holdouts. If the emergency exposed a finished unit — or a steam system past saving — the installation and replacement page covers sizing for rowhouses. The national emergency boiler repair guide explains how triage prioritization works in general.
Call (888) 766-1474 now — 24/7 emergency triage, freeze-risk calls prioritized.
