My wife smelled something the other day when we turned on the heater and I convinced her that it was just burning off dust in the system.
When I came home from work today, I had to change a light bulb in the utility room and I smelled something too but it faded so I blew it off.
When I went downstairs for a midnight snack I smelled something again so I checked out the utility closet, sniffed around the line and it definitely smelled like gas.
Called the gas company and the guy found two small leaks with his detector. He told me that fortunately, it wasn’t dangerous unless I decided to start smoking in the utility closet.
It’s fixed now, although I feel like a schmuck for not calling earlier. I didn’t realize he had been sleeping and got the call for work. My wife, who works at the phone company, assures me that he was making fat overtime for this and was not entirely unhappy to get the late night call.
Anyway, it’s a good reminder for me that if you smell gas, you should do something about it right away. Next time, it may not be so minor.
you spray or drip soapy water on the pipe or joints and the leak will blow soap bubbles.
an ordorant is added to natural gas and LP gas to make it detectable at levels before it is harmful. if you can barely smell it then it is likely not an emergency. fixing even small leaks is a good thing, even a small leak given enough time could put a dangerous amount of gas into an enclosed nonventilated space.
My wife insisted on buying one of those explosive gas/carbon monoxide/smoke detectors. The thing is so good that it goes off if she uses hair spray in the bathroom nearby.
Just a reminder to all that the smell of natural gas (from the gas company via pipe to your house) is DIFFERENT than that of propane (stored at your house in tanks).
There is no mistaking the smell of natural gas, it’s the smell we all drove the teacher nuts with from the scratch-n-sniff cards in school during the 70s/80s.
Propane smells like rotting meat/animals.
We had a leak from behind our stove, and my wife & I, and my brother-in-law were all convinced that a mouse or something had died behind our cabinets, but we couldn’t find it. We figured it out when we ran out of propane for the first time in 11 years of living in our home. The gas guy is required to do a leak check when he tried to refill (on the “hey, we’re out of gas” dispatch), and it failed.
Thankfully, it was late summer, and we had the windows open all the time during the leak. We were cooking and using all sorts of ignition inducing devices in that space during the time of the leak.