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Where a Town Page Exists, and Where It Does Not
This site covers fewer towns than it could, deliberately, and this page sets out the rule and the consequence.
In brief
BoilerBridge publishes a town page only where fuel oil reaches 5 percent of households, and a state page everywhere else. That threshold is applied after the margin of error is subtracted, so a town page exists only where the figure is confidently above it.
The rule
A town gets a page where 5% or more of households heat with fuel oil and the survey can say so with confidence — that is, where the share minus its own margin of error still clears 5%. That is 1,102 towns across 24 of the 38 states we route in; the other 14 states get a state page and no town pages.
The confidence half of that rule is new and it removed 446 towns that had passed the old one. Every figure here is an American Community Survey estimate and every estimate carries a published margin; on a small town that margin can be wider than the figure. Those 446 towns had oil shares that looked above 5% and margins wide enough that the true value could be below it — and for 83 of them it could be zero. A page telling you oil heat is a real minority in a town that may have none is the one thing this site is built not to do.
What that does not fix. Of the towns we do not publish, almost all could be above 5% at the top of their own margin. The uncertainty runs in both directions and no threshold on this data is precise. The rule makes every page that exists defensible; it does not make the excluded list correct, and we would rather say so than imply a precision the survey does not have.
Nationally the median town sits at about 1.3% oil. Boilers are a minority arrangement in American housing and heavily concentrated in the Northeast, so a national town-by-town site would be mostly pages about something the town does not have.
Towns with a page
| State | Town pages | Heat with oil |
|---|---|---|
| Arkansas | 0 | under 1% |
| Arizona | 0 | under 1% |
| California | 0 | under 1% |
| Colorado | 0 | under 1% |
| Delaware | 32 | 9% |
| Florida | 0 | under 1% |
| Georgia | 0 | under 1% |
| Hawaii | 0 | under 1% |
| Iowa | 1 | under 1% |
| Idaho | 8 | 1% |
| Illinois | 1 | under 1% |
| Indiana | 16 | 1% |
| Kansas | 0 | under 1% |
| Kentucky | 22 | 1% |
| Louisiana | 0 | under 1% |
| Massachusetts | 129 | 20% |
| Maryland | 109 | 7% |
| Maine | 6 | 63% |
| Minnesota | 2 | under 1% |
| Missouri | 0 | under 1% |
| Mississippi | 0 | under 1% |
| North Carolina | 49 | 2% |
| New Hampshire | 30 | 38% |
| New Jersey | 113 | 6% |
| New Mexico | 0 | under 1% |
| New York | 159 | 18% |
| Ohio | 56 | 2% |
| Oklahoma | 0 | under 1% |
| Oregon | 7 | 1% |
| Pennsylvania | 274 | 14% |
| Rhode Island | 23 | 26% |
| South Carolina | 1 | 1% |
| Tennessee | 1 | under 1% |
| Texas | 1 | under 1% |
| Utah | 0 | under 1% |
| Virginia | 56 | 2% |
| Washington | 3 | 2% |
| West Virginia | 3 | 6% |
Source: US Census Bureau, American Community Survey 5-year estimates, table B25040 (house heating fuel), 2023 release. The oil share is weighted across every town we route in for that state, including those below the threshold for a page.
What the figure is not
B25040 records the fuel a home heats with, not the system it heats with. It does not distinguish a boiler from a furnace, and we do not claim it does — oil heat means a boiler far more often than not, which is a statement about likelihood rather than about your basement.
A boiler is not a furnace, and the person you want knows the difference.Tell us it is a boiler, tell us what the gauge reads if you can see it, and we will route you to somebody in your area who works on them. You are never charged. Boilers give this site its name and not its limits.
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