Gas Line Repair in Houston, OH
44% of households in Houston heat with bottled or tank propane. On propane there is no utility service line and no meter boundary — the tank, the regulator and the buried run to the house are all the property owner’s.
Read this first
No regulated utility service line is involved where the gas comes out of a tank, and 44% of homes in Houston run on propane. The tank and the buried line from it are governed by the supply agreement rather than by a meter boundary, which changes who is responsible for what.
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
A tank, a regulator, and buried line between them and the house. All of it is the property owner’s, and none of it sits under the federal service line definition that governs a mains connection.
That makes the buried run private buried line — which is exactly the sort a standard locate may not mark before somebody digs.
| Households in Houston | Share |
|---|---|
| Utility (mains) gas | under 1% |
| Bottled or tank propane | 44% |
| Electricity | 38% |
| Fuel oil and kerosene | 4% |
| Wood and everything else | 14% |
Source: US Census Bureau, American Community Survey 5-year estimates, table B25040 (house heating fuel), 2023 release. Universe: 627 occupied housing units. B25040 is a fuel count, not an infrastructure count. It tells you what burns in these houses, from which the arrangement follows — but it is an inference, not a meter reading. Service line definition: 49 CFR § 192.3, via PHMSA interpretation PI-12-0003.
Across Ohio as a whole, 62% of households are on mains gas and 5% on tank propane. Houston sits 62 points below the state on mains; its propane share carries too wide a margin of error to compare. 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 Ohio towns we route in
- Miamisburg 58% mains gas · 4% tank propane
- New Springfield 27% mains gas · 9% tank propane
- Jamestown 26% mains gas · 21% tank propane
- Fort Loramie 38% mains gas · 25% tank propane
- Wilmington 45% mains gas · 12% tank propane
Checking a plumber in Ohio
Ohio licenses are issued by the Ohio Construction Industry Licensing Board, Department of Commerce, which publishes a public search you can use before work begins. Ohio licenses commercial plumbing contractors at state level; residential-only work is generally regulated locally.
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. We serve Houston for plumbing that has nothing to do with gas.
Call (888) 752-8038