Gas Line Repair in Somerset, OH
Tank propane heats 16% of homes in Somerset. 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 16% of homes in Somerset 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 Somerset 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 Somerset | Share |
|---|---|
| Utility (mains) gas | 42% |
| Bottled or tank propane | 16% |
| Electricity | 25% |
| Fuel oil and kerosene | 9% |
| Wood and everything else | 8% |
Source: US Census Bureau, American Community Survey 5-year estimates, table B25040 (house heating fuel), 2023 release. Universe: 1,859 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 Ohio as a whole, 62% of households are on mains gas and 5% on tank propane. Somerset sits 20 points below the state on mains and 11 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
A locate before digging is free, and PHMSA is unambiguous about the value — excavation damage is the leading cause of pipeline incidents and calling 8-1-1 first avoids one 99 times in a hundred. The gap to ask about is private buried line, which a standard locate may not mark.
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 Ohio towns we route in
- Ashley 28% mains gas · 26% tank propane
- Union City 42% mains gas · 14% tank propane
- Arcanum 41% mains gas · 16% tank propane
- South Charleston 44% mains gas · 11% tank propane
- Springfield 76% mains gas · 3% tank propane
Checking a plumber in Ohio
Ohio licenses are issued by the Ohio Construction Industry Licensing Board, Department of Commerce, which publishes a public search you can use before work begins. Ohio licenses commercial plumbing contractors at state level; residential-only work is generally regulated locally.
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 Somerset goes through this number as well.
Call (888) 752-8038