What to Do If You Smell Gas in Your House

Natural gas has no smell of its own. Utilities add a compound called mercaptan so a leak smells like rotten eggs or sulfur, and that smell is your warning. Treat it as real even if it is faint, and even if it comes and goes.

• Get everyone out, people and pets, and leave the door open behind you if it is on your way.
• Do not touch light switches, thermostats, appliance controls or the garage door opener. Any of them can make a spark.
• Do not use a phone inside, cell or landline. Make the call once you are outside and well away from the smell.
• Do not light anything, and do not start a car parked in an attached garage.
• Do not go looking for the leak, and do not try to stop it or work the valves yourself.
• From a neighbor's house or the street, call 911 or Piedmont Natural Gas at 800-752-7504.
• Stay out until the utility or the fire department tells you it is safe to go back in.

Piedmont Natural Gas serves most homes with natural gas in Spartanburg County and the Gaffney side of Cherokee County. Its emergency number, 800-752-7504, is for leaks, gas odor and outages, around the clock. Calling 911 is always correct, and the fire department will get the utility moving.

Not everyone is on Piedmont. Around Duncan, Lyman and Wellford, Greer CPW provides the gas, and a few other areas are served by a city or regional gas system. Whoever your utility is, its emergency number is printed on your gas bill. On propane, call your propane supplier, and 911.

Put the right number in your phone now. Nobody wants to be standing in the yard at night trying to find it.

The utility's job is to make the situation safe. A technician will check the air with a gas detector, find whether the leak is on the utility's equipment or in your house piping, and shut off gas as needed, at an appliance valve or at the meter. The utility owns and repairs the main, the service line and the meter.

Everything downstream of the meter belongs to the homeowner: the house piping, the appliance connectors and the appliances. If the leak is there, the utility will make it safe and leave the repair to you. That repair is a job for a licensed contractor, not the utility, and not a weekend project.

When we get that call, we find the leak with a detector and a soap solution, repair or replace the failed fitting, connector or section of pipe, and pressure-test the piping before anything is relit.

When a utility technician finds an unsafe condition, the appliance or the meter is usually tagged. A tag on a single appliance, like a water heater with a leaking control, means that appliance stays off while the rest of the house keeps gas. A locked meter means the whole house is off until the problem is fixed.

Turning the gas back on after a shutoff is not just opening a valve. Every appliance with a pilot has to be relit, and Piedmont's own guidance is that where service has been turned off, appliances must be checked for safe operation by a licensed contractor before service is restored. Depending on the repair, the building department may also need to inspect it.

So the practical sequence is: utility makes it safe, contractor finds and fixes the leak, the piping is tested, the utility or contractor restores gas, and every appliance is relit and checked. Ask the utility technician to tell you exactly what was found and where. It saves time on the repair.

The odorant can fade, especially when gas leaks underground and the soil absorbs some of it. Colds and allergies dull your sense of smell, cooking smells can cover it, and you stop noticing a smell you have been around for a while.

A natural gas detector, plugged in or mounted near where the gas pipe enters the house and near gas appliances, is a simple extra layer of protection. It is not the same as a carbon monoxide alarm. CO comes from appliances burning badly, not from raw gas, and you want both.