Smell gas in your house? Do this right now (and who to call: plumber or LG&E)

Most of this Learning Center is about slowing down: what a noise means, what a repair should cost, when a job can wait until Tuesday. This one is the exception. A gas smell is the one household problem where the right move is to stop diagnosing and walk out the front door, and we’d rather you hear that from a plumber than from somebody selling urgency.

Here’s the honest context, though. Most gas odor calls end small: a pilot light that blew out, a stove knob somebody’s elbow nudged, a whiff near an old fitting that gets tightened in twenty minutes. Leaving doesn’t mean the situation is dire. It means you find out from the sidewalk instead of from inside the cloud.

If you smell gas right now, do this

That’s the whole playbook. It’s the same whether the smell is strong, faint, or a hiss you can hear but can’t smell. The rest is detail, worth reading once before you ever need it.

• Don’t flip, light, or unplug anything Natural gas needs an ignition source, and the ones that get people are ordinary switches. A light switch, a doorbell, a garage door opener, a phone call made inside, even pulling a plug from the wall can throw a tiny spark. If it’s dark, use nothing. The front door is right where you left it.
• Walk everyone out, pets included Skip the source hunt. Don’t stop to open windows or check the stove. Leave the front door open behind you, because that vents the house without costing a second. Head for a neighbor’s porch or the far side of the street, not the attached garage or the car parked next to the house.
• Call 911 and LG&E from outside Both calls, once you’re clear of the house. LG&E responds to gas odor calls around the clock and doesn’t charge a dime, so there’s no bill hanging over the decision. Tell them what you smelled and where, and they’ll send a technician to test the air, find the source, and shut the gas off if it needs it.
• Stay out until you get the all-clear Nobody goes back in for a wallet or a charger. The technician will tell you when the house is safe, what the source was, and whether the meter stays on. If they shut the gas off and tag it, that tag is your to-do list, and it’s a solvable one. What happens next is covered below.

Why your house smells like rotten eggs

Natural gas has no smell at all. The rotten-egg thing is mercaptan, an odorant the utility adds for one reason: so your nose works as a leak detector. The smell is the system working as designed, which is why you should trust it. If your nose says gas, act like it’s gas.

Sewer gas carries a sulfur edge too, and plenty of smell calls turn out to be a dried-out drain trap instead. The tell is location: sewer gas hangs around drains and bathrooms that don’t get used, while a gas smell lives near appliances, the meter, or a line in a wall, and it doesn’t rinse away when you run water. We wrote up why a house smells like sewer separately. When you’re not sure, treat it as gas and make the free call. Guessing wrong in that direction costs you nothing.

Plumber or LG&E: who handles what

The dividing line is the meter. It decides who does the work and who pays for it.

• Up to and including the meter: LG&E The mains under the street, the service line across your yard, and the meter itself belong to the utility. Leaks there are theirs to find and fix, at their cost. That includes the classic outdoor signs: a gas smell near the meter, a hiss at the riser, or a stripe of dead grass over the buried line in an otherwise green yard.
• From the meter into the house: you, and your plumber Everything past the meter is yours: the black iron or CSST running through the crawl space and walls, the shutoff valves, the flexible connectors behind the range and dryer, and the lines feeding the water heater, furnace, and fireplace. LG&E will find a leak there and shut the gas off for safety, but they don’t repair customer piping. That’s licensed gas-line work, and it’s what we do.
• How the gas comes back on If LG&E tags the meter, the sequence is fixed: a plumber finds and repairs the leak, the piping has to hold a pressure test, the work gets inspected, and LG&E restores service and relights your pilots. It moves faster than people fear, and you’re not living next to an open leak meanwhile, because the gas is off.

The small stuff it usually turns out to be

A lot of gas smells trace back to something minor. None of these make leaving the wrong call. They’re just why most of these stories end with dinner running late instead of anything worse.

• A pilot light blew out On an older water heater with a standing pilot, a draft can snuff the flame, and the whiff of unburned gas near the heater is what you’re smelling. The safety valve stops the flow when the pilot dies, so the release is small. Once the house is cleared, relighting a natural gas pilot runs under $100 if you’d rather we handle it, and we’ll show you how so the next one is free.
• A pilot that won’t stay lit If it relights and dies again, the usual culprit is the thermocouple, the sensor that holds the gas valve open while the pilot burns. Replacing one runs $200–$300. If the smell keeps coming back with it, the heater’s gas control valve may be failing, and that runs $600–$700.
• A burner knob that got bumped A stove knob nudged just past off will feed a slow trickle of gas into the kitchen for hours. Utility techs find these all the time. The fix is free and slightly embarrassing, and if it’s happened once, it’s worth a glance at the knobs whenever the kitchen smells off.
• An old connection that’s loosened with age The flexible connector behind a range or dryer, or a threaded fitting on an old black iron line, can weep a little gas long before it’s a dramatic leak. Louisville’s older neighborhoods run on gas piping that’s been in service fifty years and more, and threads and valves that age don’t stay perfect. This is the category that genuinely needs a plumber.

What a real repair involves (and what it costs)

Finding a gas leak is methodical, not mystical. With the gas off, we put a pressure gauge on the system and watch whether it holds. If it drops, we isolate the piping section by section and soap-test fittings until the leak shows itself as bubbles. The fix might be tightening one fitting behind the dryer, or rerunning a corroded stretch of line. Either way, the system has to hold pressure and pass inspection before the meter goes back on.

We won’t print one repair price here, because with gas lines it would be a guess dressed up as a fact. Cost tracks with where the leak is and how much pipe has to move: a fitting in an open basement is the easy end, a buried or in-wall line is the other. What we can promise is where it starts: a diagnostic visit is $89, or $199 after hours, and you’ll have a firm number before anyone touches a wrench. If the trail leads to the water heater instead, a gas water heater diagnosis runs $100–$200.

Common questions we get

Reviewed by Spencer Gardner, Owner · William Riley, KY Master Plumber, Lic. #6590. Prices last verified August 3, 2026.