Gas Line Repair in Frankford, DE
Tank propane heats 22% of homes in Frankford. There is no service line here in the federal sense, which sounds like a technicality and is actually the whole difference.
Read this first
No regulated utility service line is involved where the gas comes out of a tank, and 22% of homes in Frankford run on propane. The tank and the buried line from it are governed by the supply agreement rather than by a meter boundary, which changes who is responsible for what.
Source: US Census Bureau, American Community Survey table B25040; the service line boundary is 49 CFR § 192.3.
If you smell gas right now
Leave the building on foot. Do not use a phone or a light switch inside. Call 911 and your gas utility from somewhere else, and do not call us — we are a referral service, not an emergency line. The full list, in order.
How Frankford is supplied
Where a mains customer has a utility on the other side of a meter, a propane customer has a supplier on the other side of a contract. It is a different relationship and it is worth reading once before it matters.
The emergency response is identical either way. Propane is odorized like natural gas, and the instruction is the same: leave, and call 911 from somewhere else.
| Households in Frankford | Share |
|---|---|
| Utility (mains) gas | 7% |
| Bottled or tank propane | 22% |
| Electricity | 61% |
| Fuel oil and kerosene | 5% |
| Wood and everything else | 6% |
Source: US Census Bureau, American Community Survey 5-year estimates, table B25040 (house heating fuel), 2023 release. Universe: 3,785 occupied housing units. The table counts heating fuel rather than pipework. A house on mains gas almost certainly has a service line; the Census does not say so directly and neither do we. Service line definition: 49 CFR § 192.3, via PHMSA interpretation PI-12-0003.
Across Delaware as a whole, 42% of households are on mains gas and 9% on tank propane. Frankford sits 36 points below the state on mains and 13 points above it on propane. That is the gap a statewide number papers over, and the reason the figures above are this town’s rather than the state’s.
Before anyone digs on the property
8-1-1 is free and nationwide, and PHMSA gives callers a 99 percent chance of avoiding an incident, injury or worse. Ask them what they will and will not mark: privately owned buried lines on your own side of the meter frequently are not covered.
Source: PHMSA, 811 Day.
What to ask whoever quotes it
Ask which side of the meter the work is on before anything else. On the utility side it may not be a contractor job at all, and a quote that has not established that has not established whose problem it is.
Other Delaware towns we route in
- Harbeson 34% mains gas · 17% tank propane
- Selbyville 23% mains gas · 20% tank propane
- Harrington 13% mains gas · 22% tank propane
- Milton 18% mains gas · 29% tank propane
- Clayton 44% mains gas · 13% tank propane
Checking a plumber in Delaware
Delaware licenses are issued by the Delaware Board of Plumbing, Heating, Ventilation, Air Conditioning and Refrigeration Examiners, which publishes a public search you can use before work begins.
Gas work is separately permitted and separately licensed in most jurisdictions, so ask specifically about gas rather than plumbing in general.
For repair work, not for a suspected leak.If you can smell gas, leave and call 911 or your utility from outside; this is the wrong number for that. For everything else — a line, a meter, an appliance connection — we will route you to a contractor covering your area, free of charge to you. Any Frankford job, gas or otherwise, is routed from here.
Call (888) 752-8038