If you smell gas, leave the building and call 911 and your gas utility from outside before anything else.
Holladay has larger lots than most of the valley, and larger lots mean gas that has to travel. A great many projects here involve a buried run out to something away from the house: a detached garage or shop, a pool or spa heater, an outdoor kitchen, a fire feature at the far end of a yard. Buried gas piping is a different proposition from piping inside a building — different materials, different depth and protection requirements, different ways of failing — and most of the problems we are called about on these properties involve a line that was installed years ago by somebody who treated it as a plumbing job.
A gas line that runs underground has to deal with corrosion, with mechanical damage, and with the transition points where it comes out of the ground. Each of those is where the requirements get specific. Buried steel has to be protected against corrosion; polyethylene gas pipe is common underground and must not be used above ground where it is exposed to sunlight and physical damage; and the riser transition from buried to above-ground piping is a defined assembly rather than an improvisation.
The failures that result from getting it wrong are slow. A steel line buried without protection corrodes from the outside over years and then leaks underground, where the gas migrates through soil rather than announcing itself. A polyethylene line brought above grade degrades in UV and fails at the exposed section. Neither of those is visible on a walk around the property.
Which is why work like this belongs to a licensed contractor pulling a permit, with the line pressure-tested and inspected before it is buried. Anything already in the ground on an older property can be tested too, and on a property with buried runs of unknown age and origin that is a reasonable thing to have done.
Before any trench is opened on a property like this, the existing utilities have to be located. In Utah that means calling Blue Stakes before digging, which is free and required, and it covers the utility-owned lines. What it does not cover is private lines on your own property — your existing gas run to the shop, irrigation, landscape lighting, a septic line, the conduit to a gate.
On a large older Holladay lot there can be a lot of that, and much of it is undocumented. A contractor who asks what you know about previous work, and who private-locates rather than assuming, is saving you the cost of repairing something else. Hand-digging near known lines rather than machine-trenching through them is part of that.
Keep a record afterward. A simple sketch of where the new line runs, how deep, what material, and where the shutoffs are is worth having, and it is the thing nobody has when the next project starts. Photographs of the open trench before backfill are the easiest version of this.
Adding a pool heater or a fire feature is the point at which many houses discover their gas supply is already fully committed. Every appliance consumes a certain amount, the meter has a capacity, and the piping has a capacity that depends on its diameter and its total length. A pool heater is a large load, and dropping one onto a system that was sized for a furnace, a water heater, a range and a dryer frequently does not work.
What that looks like in practice is not a dramatic failure. It is a furnace that struggles when the pool heater runs, a water heater that cannot keep up, appliances that do not reach their rated output. Those symptoms get blamed on the appliances for years when the actual cause is supply.
So the right sequence is a load calculation before the equipment is bought: total the demand of everything including the new appliance, check the meter capacity, and size the piping for the length of the run. Sometimes the answer is a larger meter from the utility, sometimes a larger line, and knowing which before you commit is a great deal cheaper than afterward.
On a property with buried runs of unknown age and origin, yes. Buried steel installed without corrosion protection fails slowly from the outside and then leaks underground where the gas migrates through soil rather than announcing itself, and polyethylene brought above grade degrades in sunlight. An existing line can be pressure-tested, which is a straightforward way to find out where you stand.
Yes, and it is free. What it covers is utility-owned lines. It does not cover private lines on your property — your existing gas run to the shop, irrigation, landscape lighting, septic, gate conduit — and on a large older lot there is usually plenty of undocumented work. A contractor who private-locates and hand-digs near known lines rather than machine-trenching is saving you repair costs.
Check first, because a pool heater is a large load and many houses are already fully committed. Every appliance consumes a share of the meter capacity, and the piping capacity depends on diameter and total run length. The symptoms of overloading are subtle — a furnace that struggles when the heater runs, a water heater that cannot keep up — and get blamed on appliances for years. Have the load calculated before buying equipment.
Describe the appliance and the run, and we'll match you with a licensed contractor who sizes it properly.
Get a Gas Contractor OutA short description is enough — we'll follow up to confirm details and get someone scheduled.
