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Gas Line Repair in Halifax, MA
About 21% of homes in Halifax are on mains gas and 11% on propane. The split matters because a meter is a legal boundary and a propane tank is not.
Read this first
Halifax splits between mains and tank gas, at 21% on utility gas and 11% on bottled. Which one a property has decides where responsibility changes hands: a meter outlet marks the boundary on mains gas, while a tank puts the whole installation on the owner.
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 Halifax is supplied
Where both are common, so is the assumption that they work the same way. They do not: on mains, part of the system is somebody else’s responsibility; on propane, none of it is.
| Households in Halifax | Share |
|---|---|
| Utility (mains) gas | 21% |
| Bottled or tank propane | 11% |
| Electricity | 3% |
| Fuel oil and kerosene | 63% |
| Wood and everything else | 3% |
Source: US Census Bureau, American Community Survey 5-year estimates, table B25040 (house heating fuel), 2023 release. Universe: 2,965 occupied housing units. Read it as fuel rather than as plumbing. The share on utility gas is how many houses burn it, which is the nearest thing published to how many have a service line. Service line definition: 49 CFR § 192.3, via PHMSA interpretation PI-12-0003.
Across Massachusetts as a whole, 56% of households are on mains gas and 4% on tank propane. Halifax sits 35 points below the state on mains and 8 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 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 Massachusetts towns we route in
- Millis 40% mains gas · 5% tank propane
- Bellingham 39% mains gas · 4% tank propane
- Middleboro 50% mains gas · 7% tank propane
- Rockland 58% mains gas · 3% tank propane
- Roxbury 60% mains gas · 3% tank propane
Checking a plumber in Massachusetts
Massachusetts licenses are issued by the Massachusetts Board of State Examiners of Plumbers and Gas Fitters, 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. Non-emergency work in Halifax goes through this number as well.
Call (888) 752-8038