Gas Line Repair in Chevy Chase, MD
Chevy Chase is a mains gas town — 63% of households heat with utility gas. The useful thing to know before anything goes wrong is where the utility’s responsibility stops.
Read this first
The utility's regulated line ends at the meter outlet and the piping beyond it belongs to the property owner. That boundary decides most gas line questions in Chevy Chase, where 63% of households heat with utility gas and a buried service line runs from the street on most properties.
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 Chevy Chase is supplied
The meter is doing two jobs: measuring gas, and marking where the federally regulated line stops. The second is the one that matters when something fails.
Buried customer piping past the meter — out to a garage, a grill, a generator — is the owner’s, and it is easy to forget it exists until somebody digs.
| Households in Chevy Chase | Share |
|---|---|
| Utility (mains) gas | 63% |
| Bottled or tank propane | 1% |
| Electricity | 34% |
| Fuel oil and kerosene | 1% |
| Wood and everything else | 1% |
Source: US Census Bureau, American Community Survey 5-year estimates, table B25040 (house heating fuel), 2023 release. Universe: 13,207 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 Maryland as a whole, 45% of households are on mains gas and 3% on tank propane. Chevy Chase sits 17 points above the state on mains and 2 points below 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
8-1-1 is free and nationwide, and PHMSA gives callers a 99 percent chance of avoiding an incident, injury or worse. Ask them what they will and will not mark: privately owned buried lines on your own side of the meter frequently are not covered.
Source: PHMSA, 811 Day.
What to ask whoever quotes it
Ask how the work will be tested and what happens at the end of it. An inspection on gas work is normal rather than a complication, and a contractor who treats it as one is telling you something.
Other Maryland towns we route in
- Grasonville 3% mains gas · 15% tank propane
- Takoma Park 65% mains gas · 2% tank propane
- Point Of Rocks 48% mains gas · 0% tank propane
- Cabin John 30% mains gas · 9% tank propane
- Queenstown 0% mains gas · 15% tank propane
Checking a plumber in Maryland
Maryland licenses are issued by the Maryland State Board of Plumbing, Department of Labor, 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. Non-emergency work in Chevy Chase goes through this number as well.
Call (888) 752-8038