Frequently Asked Questions

Yes, your account number will change if you change your address.

Sometimes obstacles blocking access to our power lines can slow the restoration process. That could include downed trees, blocked roads, unplowed or flooded streets or dangerous situations. Conditions throughout the system can also cause delays. Several small scattered outages can be more time-consuming to repair because they involve individual stops to reconnect lines to each home.

Yes, it will come back. Although your restoration is important to us, sometimes there are more urgent priorities that need to be addressed, such as public safety hazards, critical care, emergency operations centers and communication centers.

The truck may also be on the way to a transmission line, substation or circuit outage that will restore the greatest number of customers at the same time, you included. Our crews work round the clock during an outage, so they will return to your location as soon as they can if you remain without power.

It could be that your neighbor is served on a different circuit, but there could be trouble in just your section of the line or in the equipment that services you directly. Or, the cause of the outage could be an individual service problem at your home, unrelated to Unitil.

It sounds like something unexpected happened in the field. Our estimated restoration times are based on the best information we have, but they are still ultimately estimates. We will update those times if needed as an outage unfolds overtime. If we have additional information we think helps explain what is going on, we will relay that info via social media.

No public-facing outage map for natural gas customers is planned at this time, though we are constantly reviewing new ways to provide information to customers and will continue to review new options as technology makes them available.

ETR stands for “estimated time of restoration,” and is our best estimate as to how long it will take to restore power. As estimates are inexact by their very nature, we provide a range of times to try and give you a general idea as to when work will be complete and power will be restored.

There is a lag of a few minutes between the information on the map and the information our crews are working from, but the data you see on the map is basically the same as what our operations teams are working from. Occasionally, there will be a delay in an outage getting removed from the map, and crews need to confirm work is complete before the map is cleared.

If you are experiencing a loss of power to your home, you can report your outage:

• through your MyUnitil account under the "Account Services" tab -> "Report an Outage"
• online using our outage submission form 
• using the MyUnitil mobile app -> click "Report a Power Outage"
• by calling our Customer Service line at 1-888-301-7700

When you report your outage, a Customer Service representative makes sure that your address is loaded into our outage management system. The computer then looks at all the different calls coming in and takes its best guess based on the information which comes in as to where the trouble originated. A crew is then dispatched directly to the outage. This is another reason why it is so important to call in any outage — the more information that comes in, the better information the computer has, and the faster a crew can get where it needs to go.