Home › Rhode Island › Cranston
Gas Line Repair in Cranston, RI
Utility gas heats 66% of homes in Cranston. That puts a buried service line and a meter on most properties here, and puts the boundary between the two sides of the system exactly at the meter.
Read this first
A buried service line and a meter sit on most properties in Cranston, where 66% of homes are on mains gas. Federal rules end the utility's service line at the meter outlet, so everything downstream of the meter is the owner's to maintain and repair.
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 Cranston 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 Cranston | Share |
|---|---|
| Utility (mains) gas | 66% |
| Bottled or tank propane | 3% |
| Electricity | 9% |
| Fuel oil and kerosene | 21% |
| Wood and everything else | 1% |
Source: US Census Bureau, American Community Survey 5-year estimates, table B25040 (house heating fuel), 2023 release. Universe: 19,415 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 Rhode Island as a whole, 56% of households are on mains gas and 4% on tank propane. Cranston sits 10 points above the state on mains and 2 points below it on propane. The state number would tell you something true about the state and very little about here, which is why it is not the number above.
Before anyone digs on the property
The single most dangerous thing most people will ever do to a gas line is put a spade through it. PHMSA calls excavation damage the leading cause of pipeline incidents; 8-1-1 is a nationwide toll-free number to call before any excavation, and calling it gives a 99 percent chance of avoiding an incident.
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 Rhode Island towns we route in
- West Kingston 5% mains gas · 17% tank propane
- North Providence 66% mains gas · 5% tank propane
- Lincoln 61% mains gas · 3% tank propane
- East Greenwich 52% mains gas · 2% tank propane
- Providence 71% mains gas · 3% tank propane
Checking a plumber in Rhode Island
Rhode Island licenses are issued by the Rhode Island Division of Professional Regulation, Department of Labor and Training, 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 Cranston requests are covered by the same line.
Call (888) 752-8038