Gas Line Repair in Houston, DE
Houston has a large share of propane: 16% of households use bottled or tank gas against 1% on mains. On propane none of the installation belongs to a utility.
Read this first
Tank gas serves 16% of households in Houston. With no utility main and no meter, the boundary that matters on mains gas does not exist here, and the tank, regulator and buried line are the owner's or the supplier's under contract.
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 Houston is supplied
Propane changes the ownership question completely. There is no utility that owns a length of it, which means there is nobody else whose problem part of it is.
It also changes the risk in one specific way: propane is heavier than air and collects in low spaces rather than dispersing upward. Basements, pits and crawl spaces are where it goes.
| Households in Houston | Share |
|---|---|
| Utility (mains) gas | 1% |
| Bottled or tank propane | 16% |
| Electricity | 52% |
| Fuel oil and kerosene | 27% |
| Wood and everything else | 4% |
Source: US Census Bureau, American Community Survey 5-year estimates, table B25040 (house heating fuel), 2023 release. Universe: 648 occupied housing units. This is the heating-fuel table. It does not enumerate service lines, and no table does at this geography; what it gives is the best available indication of which arrangement a property is on. Service line definition: 49 CFR § 192.3, via PHMSA interpretation PI-12-0003.
Across Delaware as a whole, 42% of households are on mains gas and 9% on tank propane. Houston sits 41 points below the state on mains and 6 points above it on propane. That distance from the state average is the whole argument for publishing a town figure at all.
Before anyone digs on the property
One free call before any excavation. PHMSA is blunt about why: excavation damage is the leading cause of pipeline incidents, and 8-1-1 raises the odds of avoiding one to 99 in 100. It applies to a fence post as much as a foundation.
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 Delaware towns we route in
- Greenwood 2% mains gas · 11% tank propane
- Bear 51% mains gas · 6% tank propane
- Viola 0% mains gas · 39% tank propane
- Delaware City 40% mains gas · 3% tank propane
- Townsend 49% mains gas · 11% tank propane
Checking a plumber in Delaware
Delaware licenses are issued by the Delaware Board of Plumbing, Heating, Ventilation, Air Conditioning and Refrigeration Examiners, 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. Gas is one part of what Houston calls us about.
Call (888) 752-8038