Smell Gas in Your House? Do This First

Leave the house first. Do not try to turn natural gas valves on or off. Do not smoke, use a lighter, or strike a match. Do not use any electric switch, telephone or cell phone, garage door opener, or flashlight, because they can cause sparks and ignite gas. Do not start or stop nearby vehicles or machinery. Get everyone outside, pets included, then call 911 and your gas company from the driveway or a neighbor’s place.

That is the whole answer. Everything else in this article is detail. If you smell gas right now, stop reading and go.

Why you leave first

Natural gas needs one spark to ignite, and a house is full of them. A light switch. A phone ringing. A doorbell. A refrigerator compressor kicking on. A garage door opener. None of those things feel dangerous, which is exactly the problem. The instinct to air the place out or hunt for the source keeps you inside with the spark makers, and a small smell does not reliably mean a small leak. Gas pools and concentrates in ways your nose cannot map.

Outside is safe. Make the calls from there. The gas company responds to leak calls free of charge, day or night, and they would far rather check a false alarm than the alternative.

What you are actually smelling

Natural gas has no odor of its own. The rotten egg smell is mercaptan, an additive put in specifically so leaks announce themselves. So if your house smells like sulfur or rotten eggs near a gas appliance or in the basement, treat it as gas until someone with a meter says otherwise.

Two other signs count even without the smell: a hissing sound near a gas line or appliance, or a strip of dead grass over the buried line in an otherwise green yard. Hissing near an appliance means leave the house. A dead grass strip is outside, so the move there is to call the gas company right away.

What happens after you call

The gas company (around here, that is Enbridge Gas, 877-542-2630) will check the house, determine the general area of the leak, and either shut the main gas valve off or close a local valve to isolate the leak. They do not repair the leak if it is on your side of the gas meter.

Fixing the actual leak is the job of a licensed, bonded, and insured plumber. When we arrive, we locate the leak with detection equipment instead of guesswork and repair or replace the bad pipe, valve, or connector. Before the gas company comes back out to restore service, we pressure test the entire system. Once our test holds, the utility performs a second pressure test of their own, turns the gas back on, and relights your appliances. We have worked on faint, slow leaks and on genuinely dangerous ones all over the Greater Akron area, from West Akron to Medina and everywhere between. They are all serious, and a gas leak qualifies as an emergency at any hour.

Where leaks come from in houses around here

The housing in Akron and the surrounding cities such as Copley, Barberton, and Wadsworth went up mostly in the 1950s through 70s, and much of it still has the original black iron gas pipe. Iron corrodes from both sides over sixty or seventy years, and when it gets bumped or banged around, the joints can loosen just enough to leak. The flexible connectors behind stoves and dryers loosen when appliances get moved or replaced, which is why a new appliance is a common start date for a faint smell. Outside, the soil swells and shifts with every freeze-thaw cycle and works at buried lines and fittings year after year. And every spring brings a few digging accidents, which is what 811 exists to prevent. Call before you dig. It is free at oups.org.

When it is not a gas leak

Not every bad smell is gas. Water in the trap of a floor drain or a rarely used shower can evaporate and let sewer gas into the room, which also smells rotten but is a plumbing fix, not an emergency evacuation. Another cause of a slight sulfur smell is a failing anode rod in your water heater, and that one shows up only when the hot water runs. That is a water heater fix, not a gas leak.

The rule: if the smell is persistent, near gas equipment, or you hear hissing, you treat it as gas and leave. Sorting subtle smells from safe ones is what the gas company’s meter and our detection equipment are for. Nobody will fault you for the call.

Preventing gas leaks

Most of the gas leaks we repair were years in the making, which means most of them were preventable. When an appliance gets moved or replaced, the flexible connector should be changed, or at least checked for leaks. They are not meant to last forever. If a remodel opens a wall with sixty-year-old iron gas pipe in it, that is the cheapest moment there will ever be to replace that line. Before any digging project, call 811 and get the buried lines marked. It is free and takes two days’ notice.

None of that is urgent the way a smell is urgent. All of it is cheaper than the emergency version. Our gas line service covers repairs, replacements, and new runs, priced in writing before any work starts.