Commercial Gas Line Repair in Phoenix

Leave the building, tell others to leave, and from a safe place call 911 and Southwest Gas at 877-860-6020. Southwest Gas's safety guidance says not to turn on or off any electric switches, thermostats or appliance controls, or do anything that could spark. Don't try to find the leak yourself. Southwest Gas responds to leak reports, and if it finds a hazard on your piping, its tariff lets it shut off service until the problem is fixed. Then the repair is ours to make. Our page on a gas smell in a restaurant covers how to tell gas from sewer odor once everyone is safe.

The meter is the dividing line. Southwest Gas's Arizona tariff makes the customer responsible, at its own expense, for piping beyond the point of delivery, which is generally the outlet side of the meter. The service line, riser and meter belong to the utility, and it repairs those. Everything after the meter is customer piping: the house line, the roof run to equipment, the manifold behind the cooking line, and buried yard lines to other buildings or patio heaters. See who fixes a gas leak.

In a strip center or office park, the lease decides which owner or tenant pays for piping on a shared meter. Our page on who owns the gas piping in a strip center covers that split.

The usual failure points on commercial piping:

• Threaded joints and unions that loosen with vibration or were never sealed right, often behind kitchen equipment that gets moved for cleaning.
• Corroded steel where pipe passes through an exterior wall, sits on a roof, or meets the ground at a riser. The fuel gas code requires pipe through an outside wall to be coated or wrapped against corrosion and rooftop pipe to sit at least 3 1/2 inches above the roof surface.
• Valves that weep at the stem or won't close fully.
• Connectors that have been kinked, crushed, or reused on a second appliance.
• Buried lines that have lost their coating. That job has its own page: underground commercial gas line repair.

We find the leak with a combustible gas detector and leak-detecting fluid, which are the methods Section 406.5.1 of the code names, then confirm the extent before cutting anything.

People call it a red tag. The tariff calls it a disconnection for an unsafe condition, and it says Southwest Gas will try to tell you the corrective action needed. What happens next depends on why the gas went off, and Phoenix's gas clearance table spells it out:

For a permitted repair, we pull the permit, make the repair, test it and call for the city inspection. The city sends the clearance and Southwest Gas restores service. Its tariff says it runs a leak check at turn-on and can refuse service until a licensed plumber or public official certifies the system. Our page on what a Southwest Gas red tag means covers the homeowner side of the same process.

Other Valley cities run their own permit offices. Mesa, for one, added a rule that nobody connects fuel to a permitted system until the code official authorizes it.

How much testing a repair needs depends on what was opened up. Section 406.1.2 says piping affected by a repair gets tested, but minor repairs can skip the full pressure test if the work is inspected and the joints are checked with leak-detecting fluid. Replacing a section of pipe, a valve or a manifold usually means isolating that piping and putting it on a gauge. Section 406.5 treats any drop on the gauge as a leak unless something else clearly explains it. After gas comes back, Section 406.6.3 requires an immediate leak check, and appliances are purged and relit before anyone cooks. Details are on our gas pressure testing page.

Sometimes patching one joint is the wrong fix. If a run is corroded along its length, if old repairs keep failing, or if the piping was undersized to begin with and you're adding equipment, replacing the run costs less over time than chasing leaks. We'll tell you which one you're looking at after the leak is found. If the problem is a single appliance's connector, that's a kitchen equipment hookup job, and in Phoenix installing an appliance connector is the one alteration the clearance table leaves out.

And if the leak is at the meter or the riser coming out of the ground to it, that belongs to Southwest Gas. We'll tell you when it's theirs.

We offer 24/7 emergency service for gas leaks on your side of the meter. We locate the leak, make the repair, test it, pull the permit when one is required and get the clearance to Southwest Gas so service can be restored. You get an upfront price before work starts. Related: commercial gas line service, emergency plumbing and restaurant plumbing.