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.

If you are here for a different reason, because the gas company already came out, checked everything, and found no leak, and you still smell it, skip to the second half of this article. That situation has its own set of answers.

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.

The gas company found no leak. So what am I smelling?

Now the other half of this article. The utility came out, walked the house with a meter, and found nothing. You are relieved and not relieved, because you still smell it. That does not mean you imagined it. It usually means the smell is real and is not natural gas. Four causes show up over and over in houses around Akron, and each one leaves its own fingerprint.

Sewer gas from a dry trap or a failed wax ring

Every drain in your house has a P-trap, a U-shaped bend that holds a few inches of water as a plug against sewer gas. When a drain sits unused, that water evaporates and the plug is gone. Sewer gas drifts up into the room, and it carries the same rotten egg note as mercaptan, close enough to fool anyone.

The basement floor drain is the classic, because it usually sits a few feet from the furnace and water heater. Sewer gas comes up the drain, your nose finds it standing next to the gas appliances, and the appliances take the blame. Guest bathrooms and seasonal spaces pull the same trick after a few months of sitting idle. The tell: the smell is strongest near one specific drain or an unused bathroom, fades when the room airs out, then comes back.

The test costs nothing. Pour a pitcher of water down the suspect drain and wait a day. If the smell fades, the trap was dry, and a slow pour every few weeks keeps it sealed. If the smell sits at the base of a toilet instead, the wax ring under it has likely failed and is letting sewer gas seep out at the floor. That one is a plumber appointment, not a pitcher of water.

A whiff at the burner, then gone

When a gas burner lights, a small puff of gas can leave the port before the flame catches, and you smell it for a second or two. Then the flame burns it off and the smell is gone. That brief whiff at ignition, and only at ignition, is the one gas smell that is usually nothing. If ignition has gotten slow and the whiff is growing, the appliance is due for service before it gets worse. The line to hold: a smell that outlives ignition, or shows up when nothing just lit, goes back to the leave-and-call rule at the top of this page.

A water heater flue that is backdrafting

A gas water heater sends exhaust several hundred degrees hot up a flue. When the draft fails, that exhaust spills out at the top of the tank and into the basement instead, carrying a hot, gassy odor with it. This one matters more than the smell, because spilled exhaust carries carbon monoxide, which has no smell at all. Look at the top of the tank: melted or warped plastic collars, rust streaks, moisture, or a corroded draft hood are the fingerprints, and it gets worse when the clothes dryer or bath fans run and pull air out of the house. We wrote up the whole failure in what melted plastic on top of a water heater means. Not an evacuation, but a shut-off-the-burner and call-today problem, and a reason to keep a CO alarm near the mechanical room either way.

Rotten eggs only in the hot water

On well water, harmless sulfur bacteria can set up shop inside the water heater and react with the tank’s anode rod, and the result is a rotten egg smell that rides the hot water. The tell is the cleanest of the four: run cold water and smell nothing, run hot water and there it is, strongest at the tap and in shower steam. We see it on well systems around Sharon Center, Bath, and rural Medina County. The fix is usually a different anode rod and a good flush, which is water heater work, and if the well side needs attention while the system is open, our well pump service covers the pump, pressure tank, and switch. A heater that also pops and rumbles is fighting sediment on top of the bacteria, and that noise has its own article.

When to leave, and when to book a plumber

The decision rule, plainly. Treat it as gas and leave, every time: the smell is near a gas line or gas appliance and it lingers, repeats, or grows. You hear hissing, ever. There is a dead strip of grass over the buried line outside. You feel dizzy or headachy at home and better once you step out. The utility’s leak checks are free, and nobody there, or here, will fault you for calling twice.

Book a plumber instead: the smell tracks a drain, a floor drain, an unused bathroom, or the base of a toilet. It shows up only when hot water runs. It happens only at burner ignition. There is melted plastic or moisture at the top of the water heater, and that last one is a today appointment, not a someday one.

And the honest middle case: the utility found nothing, none of the tells above fit, and the smell keeps coming back near gas equipment. Small leaks can be intermittent, and a single walk with a meter can miss one. A licensed gas plumber can isolate the house lines and pressure test them, which settles the question your nose cannot.

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.