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Gas Line Repair in Oxford, PA
Tank propane heats 17% of homes in Oxford. There is no service line here in the federal sense, which sounds like a technicality and is actually the whole difference.
Read this first
17% of households in Oxford 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 Oxford 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 Oxford | Share |
|---|---|
| Utility (mains) gas | 44% |
| Bottled or tank propane | 17% |
| Electricity | 19% |
| Fuel oil and kerosene | 16% |
| Wood and everything else | 4% |
Source: US Census Bureau, American Community Survey 5-year estimates, table B25040 (house heating fuel), 2023 release. Universe: 5,948 occupied housing units. B25040 records what heats the house, which is the best available guide to whether a property has mains gas or a tank — it does not count service lines directly. Service line definition: 49 CFR § 192.3, via PHMSA interpretation PI-12-0003.
Across Pennsylvania as a whole, 50% of households are on mains gas and 5% on tank propane. Oxford sits 7 points below the state on mains and 12 points above it on propane. A state figure would flatten exactly that difference, which is the reason these pages are built town by town instead.
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 Pennsylvania towns we route in
- Shippensburg 20% mains gas · 5% tank propane
- Villanova 69% mains gas · 3% tank propane
- Bethel 0% mains gas · 11% tank propane
- Lansdowne 63% mains gas · 2% tank propane
- Media 43% mains gas · 5% tank propane
Checking a plumber in Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania has no state license for plumbers. Its Department of Labor and Industry states it has no jurisdiction and keeps no records of which municipalities require one, so the only reliable answer is your own city or township. Start here. Ask the contractor which municipality licenses them and confirm it with that office 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 Oxford calls us about.
Call (888) 752-8038