Who and how to I call to have internal gas lines checked for tiny leaks ?

Who and how to I call to have internal gas lines checked for tiny leaks ?

A guy from the Gas company did a check and noted that a very miniscule amount of leakage was taking place. He said less than what a pilot light would use. He could not find an evident leakage with his equipment as he went around the house, so it might be in an unobserved pipe in the wall somewhere.

We would like to have someone come and do the full discovery of what and where the leak is if truly there. There is the faintest hint of gas odor, but it is an old house and may be some other factor that we are misassigning to a gas leak.

We were told that an independent person does this and not a Gas Company person.

Should I call an experienced plumber or are there specialists that do this or are there high quality handymen who might be particularly able in this area ? Thanks in advance.

Fred

Reply to
Fred Atlas
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Not all plumbers do gas but many do, call around and ask what kind of equipment they use. Choose the one with the most sensitive sniffer since your leak is subtle. You could aslo do what is recommended for water leaks and that is turn off all gas appliances and note the meter reading an hour or two apart (this will at least confirm and quantify the leak) sometimes sniffers give false positives.

Also look up Gas fitters in the yellow pages. Most of the 1-800 plumber type companies have all the trades you need and can dispatch the correct one quickly.

Reply to
PipeDown

go down to your local hvac shop and by some stuff called "blue gu". It's purpose is to find leaks in ac freon lines. When you spray it on it will make a very obvious bubble at any leak. although it is for finding freon leaks, I have used it several times to find gas leaks.

Reply to
Al Moran

very surprising the gas company did not turn off your service and tell you to have it fixed.

did some beginner mistakenly use teflon tape when hooking up the compression nut of the gas appliance flex to the rounded adapter end?

or how about this: this leakage of mine for $1000 in damage in 1978 caught fire by bic lighter an hour later after i went poking around in search of a pesky leak. where an old gas line left the basement and travelled up in an exterior wall there turned out to be a leak where the pipe elbowed up thru dirt.

install fresh air into the area where you will be working and exhaust the gas smell. remove all lighters and matches from the worksite. don't light anything. don't leave for lunch unless the main is off. isolate sections of your gas service with new gas valves. turn them all off. turn one on at a time to repeat the leak.

Reply to
buffalobill

Reply to
Fred Atlas

Here is my gas leak story:

This was many years ago when I lived in a waterfront house in NY.

I had been smelling gas occasionally for several weeks when outside at the rear of the house. It was getting worse, so one morning I called the local gas company. A tech came over with a sniffer. He started poking the ground with it and was seeing traces. Then it was getting stronger and one reading was at a "Yikes" level.

He shut the gas off at the street and said someone would be by shortly to repair it. Within an hour, a 2 or 3 man crew arrived and started digging. They uncovered the pipe from the street and discovered that it had a whole bunch of els and wandered about a bit before it went to my house. I have no idea why it was installed that way. Perhaps to join the street pipe to the house pipe without any cutting. What they did is just cut the mess off and they ran a yellow plastic tube inside the pipes to the street and the house with it exposed for a short distance They burried this again, turned on the gas, lit the pilots, and all was well.

Reply to
Rich Greenberg

Last year a homeowner in town smelled gas so he called for the gas company. They sent a guy out and he inserted a probe into the ground making the leak even worse when he punctured the plastic line. Half hour later B O O OM. ! ! ! ! House is gone and damaged the one on either side of it.

Reply to
Edwin Pawlowski

Hmm, thought I recognized the symptoms but you have a different story than mine.

We started smelling gas in the living room. I couldn't figure out what was going on since our furnace wasn't near by and there was no smell by the furnace.

The gas company came out and found the leak. Before the meter there's a pressure safety valve. The valve started to leak. The gas was coming in the open window so that we were smelling it in the living room.

Reply to
Dan Espen

Dishwasher soap and water mixed in an old spray bottle is a great compressed gas or air leak detector. Consentrate on joints and connectors. If you don't have any luck, better get an expert in quick.

Reply to
rdglide03-dbasedos

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