Gas Line Repair in New Hampshire, New Jersey & Southern Maine

If you smell gas, get out and call from outside

Gas has no odor of its own. The rotten egg smell is mercaptan, added so a leak reaches your nose long before it reaches a concentration that can ignite. Trust it even when it is faint.

Get everyone and the pets outside and leave the door open. Do not touch a light switch, a thermostat, a garage door opener or any appliance on the way out, and do not use your phone until you are well away from the building. Call 911 and your gas utility emergency line from there. Both answer around the clock and neither charges you. Stay out until someone with a meter says the house is clear.

The utility will shut the gas off and red tag whatever is leaking. It will not repair piping inside your walls. That is the gas fitter call, and it comes after the house is safe.

The leaks too small to scare you

Most gas calls are not emergencies. They are slow, faint and easy to live with, which is why they run for months.

• An odor near the meter, the dryer or the water heater that comes and goes
• Rust or white crust blooming at a threaded joint in a damp basement
• Pilots that will not stay lit, or burner flames running lazy and yellow instead of tight and blue
• A stripe of dead grass above a buried line to a grill or pool heater

Repair work covers all of that, plus the jobs nobody files under gas: capping a live line behind an appliance you pulled out, replacing a brittle connector, swapping a corroded exterior riser. Headaches or nausea that ease when you leave the house are a different problem. That is combustion, not piping, and it calls for a carbon monoxide alarm and a burner inspection.

Finding it, then proving the repair holds

A visit starts with a survey, not a wrench. We sweep from the meter forward with a combustible gas detector, narrowing a whole house down to one run, then soap every joint in that run to put eyes on the escape. Behind finished wall or under a slab, we isolate sections and let pressure tell us which one is losing.

The repair is half the job. Gas piping goes back in service on a pressure test, never on a hunch: we cap the section, charge it with air well above working pressure, and watch a gauge for the full required period. No drop, or it does not get gas. In most towns here the inspector wants to see that gauge holding before anything closes up, and the utility will not relight the meter until it passes.

Adding a line for a range, a dryer or a generator

New runs get sized off two numbers: the total demand of every appliance on the system, and the distance from the meter to the farthest one. Undersized pipe does not fail loudly. It starves appliances quietly, so the furnace short cycles whenever the new load fires and you spend a season blaming the furnace.

Standby generators expose this fastest. One can demand more fuel at full load than the rest of the house combined, and it does it during an ice storm with the heat already running flat out. Sometimes the answer is larger pipe. Sometimes the utility has to upsize the meter and regulator, which runs on their calendar. Every appliance also needs a shutoff within reach and a connector that never passes through a wall, a floor or the back of a cabinet.

CSST bonding, and what changes on propane

If flexible yellow or black tubing runs through your joists instead of black iron, that is CSST, and its wall is thin. Lightning near the house energizes metal throughout the structure, and unbonded tubing can take an arc straight through that wall while carrying gas. Code requires it bonded directly to the electrical service ground with heavy copper, typically 6 AWG, clamped near where the gas comes in. A missing bond is the most common defect we find on tubing installed without a permit.

Propane escapes the opposite way from natural gas. Natural gas is lighter than air and rises toward a window. Propane sinks, pooling in basements, crawl spaces, window wells and floor drains, and staying there. The search starts low, and so do the detectors. It also burns at higher pressure through smaller orifices, so a natural gas range will not run safely on propane without the manufacturer conversion kit.

Where no main reaches the road, which is most of rural New Hampshire and much of southern Maine, propane is the default and cold complicates it. Liquid propane has to vaporize before it burns, and vaporization slows as a tank runs cold and low, so an undersized tank falls behind a generator on the worst night of winter. Regulator vents pack with drifted snow. On the Jersey Shore, salt air eats exterior risers and meter fittings.

Why homeowners hand this one to us

Gas fitting is licensed separately in each of the three states we cover, and our plumbers hold those licenses. We pull the permit, run the test in front of the inspector, and coordinate the relight with the utility so nobody in your house is opening valves.

A person answers the phone, and we run same day where the schedule allows, because a gas call is not a next week problem. Pricing is upfront before work starts. Every repair carries our Lifetime Workmanship Guarantee: if what we installed is not right, we come back and make it right. Veteran owned, and straight with you about what needs replacing and what does not.

Related Plumbing services

• Leak Detection
• Water Heaters
• Drain Cleaning
• Sewer Lines
• Trenchless Sewer Lining