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Allegheny County logged 690 severe weather events between 2015 and 2024, including 548 damaging wind events, 115 hail events and 12 tornadoes. A boiler itself sits inside, away from the weather, but the power it runs on does not always hold up through a storm like that.
Statewide, 15% of Pennsylvania households lost power for 24 hours or more in 2024. A gas boiler still needs electricity to run its igniter and controls, so an outage that long means no heat until the power comes back, even with gas flowing to the house.
A boiler that kicks on and off before the house warms up usually has a bad thermostat signal or a failing aquastat.
That short cycling wears the burner and controls faster, so the fix gets more expensive the longer it runs that way.
Most boiler failures trace back to a handful of parts, and they tend to fail in the same order year after year. The igniter or pilot assembly goes first, since it fires every single cycle and the electrode wears down with use. Circulator pumps are next. The bearings inside wear out from constant running, and a pump that's seized or weak can't push water through the system even if the burner lights fine. Zone valves stick or fail electrically, which leaves one part of the house cold while the rest heats normally. Pressure and temperature controls drift out of calibration over years of heating and cooling, and when they do, the boiler either short cycles or runs longer than it should. The heat exchanger is the one that matters most, because it's the part everything else depends on, and it fails from the inside through corrosion or thermal stress, not from any one bad part feeding it.
If the house just rode out a power cut, a boiler that won't fire may just be waiting on its igniter and controls to reset. Have it checked before you assume the worst. If it's still not catching once power is back, that's worth a call.
Find a contractorA cold boiler should read somewhere around the midpoint on the gauge, usually marked in a colored band. If the needle has dropped below that band, the system has lost water or lost pressure, and that alone can stop a boiler from firing. Some boilers have a feed valve you can open to bring the pressure back up. If it won't hold once you've done that, something is leaking and that's a job for a tech.
Boilers have a power switch, often mounted on or near the unit, styled like a light switch on the wall. Check that it hasn't been bumped off. Check the breaker it runs on too. If the switch is on and the breaker hasn't tripped but the boiler still won't start, the problem is inside the unit and flipping anything else won't help.
A boiler that's making noise, leaking a little, or short cycling will still call for heat, and that's the problem. Each cycle it runs in that condition loads the same weak part again. A cracked heat exchanger gets worse under the stress of heating up and cooling down. A failing circulator pump can seize entirely if it keeps straining against whatever's blocking it. Water pressure that's low gets lower each time the system heats and cools, until there's not enough left to fire at all. None of that fixes itself by waiting. The boiler running one more cycle doesn't give a bad part a chance to settle down, it just gives it one more chance to fail outright.
A tech who's worked on a lot of boilers can usually tell you fast whether a repair makes sense. Age matters, but so does what's actually failing. A circulator pump or a zone valve is a contained job, worth fixing on almost any boiler that's otherwise sound. A cracked heat exchanger is a different question, because that part isn't sold on its own and the labor to get at it is most of a new unit's cost anyway. Rust around the base or at pipe joints tells you the tank itself is going, and no amount of patching the controls changes that. If the same part has already been replaced once and is failing again, that's the boiler telling you it's done, not the part.
