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Gas Line Repair in Chatham, NJ
Gas arrives by pipe for 86% of homes in Chatham. The part of it you can see is the meter; the part that goes wrong most expensively is the part you cannot.
Read this first
A buried service line and a meter sit on most properties in Chatham, where 86% 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 Chatham is supplied
A buried run from the street to a meter, and piping onward through the property. Federal rules end the service line at the meter outlet; what comes after is customer piping.
The piping people forget they own is the buried run from the meter to a detached garage, a grill or a pool heater. That is theirs, and it may not be marked when somebody comes to locate lines.
| Households in Chatham | Share |
|---|---|
| Utility (mains) gas | 86% |
| Bottled or tank propane | 2% |
| Electricity | 9% |
| Fuel oil and kerosene | 2% |
| Wood and everything else | 1% |
Source: US Census Bureau, American Community Survey 5-year estimates, table B25040 (house heating fuel), 2023 release. Universe: 6,690 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 New Jersey as a whole, 74% of households are on mains gas and 2% on tank propane. Chatham sits 11 points above the state on mains and about level with it on propane. A state figure would flatten exactly that difference, which is the reason these pages are built town by town instead.
Before anyone digs on the property
PHMSA describes excavation damage as the leading cause of pipeline incidents, and puts the effect of one free phone call plainly: someone who calls 8-1-1 before they dig has a 99 percent chance of avoiding an incident, injury, harm to the environment and even death.
Source: PHMSA, 811 Day.
What to ask whoever quotes it
Ask them to describe the fault before they price it. "The line needs replacing" is not a diagnosis, and on a buried run the difference between one damaged point and a line at the end of its life is most of the cost.
Other New Jersey towns we route in
- Hillsborough 76% mains gas · 1% tank propane
- Maplewood 76% mains gas · 1% tank propane
- Tenafly 87% mains gas · 3% tank propane
- Stanhope 4% mains gas · 6% tank propane
- Millington 86% mains gas · 0% tank propane
Checking a plumber in New Jersey
New Jersey licenses are issued by the New Jersey State Board of Examiners of Master Plumbers, Division of Consumer Affairs, 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 Chatham for plumbing that has nothing to do with gas.
Call (888) 752-8038