Which electric utility actually serves your town

The three answers

Every address in these two counties falls into one of three buckets, and which one you are in changes who you call and what options you have.

PECO — most of both counties

PECO serves roughly 1.6 million electric customers across south-eastern Pennsylvania and is also the natural gas utility for more than 511,000 of them. If you are anywhere in the lower two-thirds of either county, this is almost certainly you. Worth noting that PECO's gas territory and its electric territory are not identical — it does not supply gas to Philadelphia, for instance.

PPL — upper Bucks and upper Montgomery

This is the one that catches people out, because the boundary runs through towns that feel like they ought to be PECO. PPL's published territory includes:

• Bucks boroughs: Richlandtown, Sellersville, Silverdale, Telford, Trumbauersville.

• Bucks townships: East Rockhill, Haycock, Hilltown, Milford, Richland, Springfield, West Rockhill.

• Montgomery boroughs: East Greenville, Pennsburg, Red Hill, Souderton, Telford.

• Montgomery townships: Franconia, Hatfield, Upper Hanover.

Telford appears twice because the borough straddles the county line. If you are in Souderton or Telford and have been calling PECO, that is why the conversation has been going badly.

Perkasie and Quakertown — municipal utilities

Both boroughs own and run their own electric systems, which puts them in a genuinely different regulatory category from everywhere else around them.

• Perkasie is one of thirty-five Pennsylvania communities that own their distribution system, and has held its own since 1947.

• Quakertown has run a borough-owned electric department since the early 1890s, feeding a 69 kV to 12 kV substation.

Two consequences follow. Neither borough is regulated by the Public Utility Commission in the way an investor-owned utility is, and neither has retail electric choice — so the supplier-switching offers that arrive in the post do not apply to you.

When this actually matters

1. Service and meter upgrades. The application, the scheduling and the coordination with your electrician all run through whichever utility owns the line to your house.

2. Generators. A standby unit usually wants a gas supply, and the gas utility is a separate question from the electric one. In PPL territory your electricity and your gas come from two different companies.

3. Outage reporting and restoration. Reporting to the wrong utility during a storm is a wasted hour at the worst possible time.

4. Supply shopping. Retail choice exists in PECO and PPL territory. It does not exist in Perkasie or Quakertown.

Water is fragmented too, and more so

There is no single water utility here either, and the pattern is messier than electricity. Aqua Pennsylvania serves Bristol, Chalfont and New Britain boroughs along with Bensalem, Bristol, New Britain and Solebury townships. Newtown Artesian and Pennsylvania American cover other pockets. Municipal authorities handle the rest.

The North Wales Water Authority straddles both counties, serving more than 50,000 customers across fourteen municipalities including Horsham, Warminster, Warrington and North Wales, drawing from Lake Galena and the Delaware River at Point Pleasant.

And a large share of the upper end of both counties is on neither — private wells, permitted at the county level rather than the township one. In Doylestown Township alone, over half of the roughly 6,000 households are on private wells.