Gas Line Repair in Evanston, IL
Utility gas heats 77% of homes in Evanston. That puts a buried service line and a meter on most properties here, and puts the boundary between the two sides of the system exactly at the meter.
Read this first
A buried service line and a meter sit on most properties in Evanston, where 77% of homes are on mains gas. Federal rules end the utility's service line at the meter outlet, so everything downstream of the meter is the owner's to maintain and repair.
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 Evanston is supplied
The meter is doing two jobs: measuring gas, and marking where the federally regulated line stops. The second is the one that matters when something fails.
Buried customer piping past the meter — out to a garage, a grill, a generator — is the owner’s, and it is easy to forget it exists until somebody digs.
| Households in Evanston | Share |
|---|---|
| Utility (mains) gas | 77% |
| Bottled or tank propane | 2% |
| Electricity | 18% |
| Fuel oil and kerosene | under 1% |
| Wood and everything else | 3% |
Source: US Census Bureau, American Community Survey 5-year estimates, table B25040 (house heating fuel), 2023 release. Universe: 33,076 occupied housing units. What B25040 measures is the heating fuel, not the connection. It is the closest published proxy for whether there is a buried service line here, and it is a proxy. Service line definition: 49 CFR § 192.3, via PHMSA interpretation PI-12-0003.
Across Illinois as a whole, 82% of households are on mains gas and 2% on tank propane. Evanston sits 5 points below the state on mains and about level with it on propane. That distance from the state average is the whole argument for publishing a town figure at all.
Before anyone digs on the property
One free call before any excavation. PHMSA is blunt about why: excavation damage is the leading cause of pipeline incidents, and 8-1-1 raises the odds of avoiding one to 99 in 100. It applies to a fence post as much as a foundation.
Source: PHMSA, 811 Day.
What to ask whoever quotes it
Ask how much gas work they actually do, not whether they can. Gas is separately licensed in most jurisdictions and plenty of capable plumbers do very little of it.
Other Illinois towns we route in
- Posen 87% mains gas · 0% tank propane
- Dolton 87% mains gas · under 1% tank propane
- West Chicago 88% mains gas · 1% tank propane
- Davis 72% mains gas · 17% tank propane
- Woodridge 83% mains gas · 1% tank propane
Checking a plumber in Illinois
Illinois licenses are issued by the Illinois Department of Public Health, Plumbing Program, 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. We serve Evanston for plumbing that has nothing to do with gas.
Call (888) 752-8038