Home › Massachusetts › Manchester
Gas Line Repair in Manchester, MA
64% of households in Manchester take mains gas. Two things follow: there is a buried line on the property, and somebody other than you is responsible for part of it.
Read this first
Responsibility changes hands at the meter outlet. The line under the ground between the street and the meter is the utility's up to that point, and the yard line and house piping after it are the property owner's. 64% of homes in Manchester heat with utility gas.
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 Manchester 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 Manchester | Share |
|---|---|
| Utility (mains) gas | 64% |
| Bottled or tank propane | 5% |
| Electricity | 2% |
| Fuel oil and kerosene | 26% |
| Wood and everything else | 3% |
Source: US Census Bureau, American Community Survey 5-year estimates, table B25040 (house heating fuel), 2023 release. Universe: 2,212 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 Massachusetts as a whole, 56% of households are on mains gas and 4% on tank propane. Manchester sits about level with 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
Before any digging — a fence post as much as a foundation — call 8-1-1. It is a nationwide toll-free number, it costs nothing, and PHMSA puts the chance of avoiding an incident afterwards at 99 percent.
Source: PHMSA, 811 Day.
What to ask whoever quotes it
Ask whether the job needs a permit and who is pulling it. Gas work is separately permitted in most jurisdictions and the answer should not be you.
Other Massachusetts towns we route in
- East Walpole 62% mains gas · 2% tank propane
- Reading 45% mains gas · 4% tank propane
- Sagamore Beach 52% mains gas · 10% tank propane
- Newton Upper Falls 66% mains gas · under 1% tank propane
- Wakefield 47% 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. Gas is one part of what Manchester calls us about.
Call (888) 752-8038