If you smell gas, leave the building and call 911 and your gas utility from outside before anything else.
Murray has an older housing core, and the gas piping in those houses is mostly black steel installed when the house was built and extended piecemeal since. Steel pipe lasts a long time, and the places it fails are predictable: threaded joints, anywhere it passes through or sits on concrete, and at the transition outside near the meter where it gets weather. The other thing we find regularly in houses that have been remodeled is corrugated stainless steel tubing — CSST — installed without the bonding its manufacturers require, which is a genuine safety issue and a cheap one to correct.
Steel gas pipe does not fail along its length; it fails at specific vulnerable points. Threaded joints are the first, because the thread cuts into the wall thickness and the joint compound ages. Second is anywhere pipe is in contact with concrete or buried in a slab, where moisture and dissimilar materials drive corrosion. Third is the exterior section near the meter, which gets rain, snowmelt and road salt.
What to look for is straightforward: flaking rust on exterior pipe, staining or a crust at a joint, pipe that is wet where it enters concrete, and anything that has clearly been painted over to hide it. None of those is a leak by itself, and all of them are reasons to have the system pressure-tested rather than inspected by eye.
A pressure test is the real answer to "is my gas piping sound". It is a defined procedure, it finds leaks that no visual inspection would, and on a house with piping of unknown vintage it is a reasonable thing to ask for. It is also what should be done after any work on the system, and it is fair to ask for the result.
Corrugated stainless steel tubing became common because it is far faster to install than rigid steel, and it is a perfectly good product installed correctly. The specific requirement people miss is electrical bonding: CSST has to be bonded to the electrical grounding system, because a nearby lightning strike can induce current in the tubing and arc through its relatively thin wall.
That is not theoretical and it is why manufacturers and code require the bond. The fix on an existing installation is a bonding conductor from the CSST system to the electrical service grounding, installed properly — a modest job for a licensed contractor and far cheaper than the alternative.
If your house has had a kitchen remodel, an addition, a fireplace installed or a water heater relocated in the last twenty-odd years, there may be CSST in it, usually recognizable as yellow or black flexible jacketed tubing. Whether it is bonded is worth establishing, and it is one of the highest-value gas safety checks available on a house of this vintage.
A house that has been remodeled several times over fifty years commonly has gas piping that goes nowhere: a stub where a wall heater used to be, a capped line behind a cabinet, a run to a fireplace that was converted to electric. Capped properly these are harmless. Capped with the wrong fitting, or left with a valve that somebody can turn, they are not.
Worth knowing: a gas line should be capped, not simply shut off, when it is taken out of service, and the cap belongs at the end of the pipe rather than relying on a valve to hold indefinitely. During any other gas work it is cheap to have abandoned runs identified and either removed or properly terminated.
The same visit is a good moment to find out where your main shutoff is and how to operate it, and to confirm every appliance has its own accessible shutoff. Those are things everyone in the household should know and most do not.
Have it pressure-tested rather than inspected by eye — that is a defined procedure and it finds leaks no visual check would. Visually, the things worth reacting to are flaking rust on exterior pipe, staining or crusting at a threaded joint, pipe that is wet where it enters concrete, and anything painted over to hide it. The exterior section near the meter is the most exposed part.
Corrugated stainless steel tubing — usually yellow or black flexible jacketed tubing, common since the 1990s. It has to be bonded to the electrical grounding system because a nearby lightning strike can induce current in it and arc through its relatively thin wall. Manufacturers and code require the bond. If your house has had a remodel, addition or fireplace installed in that period, it is worth checking.
Not if it is capped properly. A line taken out of service should be capped at the end of the pipe rather than left relying on a valve to hold indefinitely, and it should not have a valve anyone can casually turn. During any other gas work it is inexpensive to have abandoned runs identified and either removed or properly terminated — and a good moment to confirm every appliance has its own accessible shutoff.
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.
