Gas Line Repair in Wells, ME
Wells has a large share of propane: 22% of households use bottled or tank gas against 1% on mains. On propane none of the installation belongs to a utility.
Read this first
22% of households in Wells use bottled or tank gas, which puts the supply on the property rather than under the street. There is no utility service line and no meter boundary: the tank, the regulator and the line to the house belong to the owner or the gas supplier by 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 Wells is supplied
No meter, no service line, no tariff. On propane the whole installation is one thing and it is yours, from the tank to the appliance.
Which is why the buried section deserves attention here more than it does on a mains connection: nobody else is watching it.
| Households in Wells | Share |
|---|---|
| Utility (mains) gas | 1% |
| Bottled or tank propane | 22% |
| Electricity | 9% |
| Fuel oil and kerosene | 56% |
| Wood and everything else | 12% |
Source: US Census Bureau, American Community Survey 5-year estimates, table B25040 (house heating fuel), 2023 release. Universe: 5,006 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 Maine as a whole, 5% of households are on mains gas and 16% on tank propane. Wells sits 4 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
Before any digging — a fence post as much as a foundation — call 8-1-1. It is a nationwide toll-free number, it costs nothing, and PHMSA puts the chance of avoiding an incident afterwards at 99 percent.
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 Maine towns we route in
Checking a plumber in Maine
Maine licenses are issued by the Maine Plumbers' Examining Board, Office of Professional and Occupational Regulation, 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. Other Wells requests are covered by the same line.
Call (888) 752-8038