Gas Leak is Bad News but Easily Fixed

We audited a beautiful older home in Buckhead recently and we found a lot of issues. The house was incredibly leaky and the ductwork system was put together incorrectly. One of the downstairs ducts was attached to the upstairs thermostat and conversely, an upstairs duct was attached to the downstairs thermostat. Naturally, the client couldn’t moderate the temperature because the system was set up backwards. That’s peculiar but that wasn’t the most substantial issue we found in this house.

To put this in context, this client has a newborn baby in the home. The couple has a nanny that watches the child in the daytime while they are at work so the baby is there all of the time. That said, when we utilized our gas leak detector on the gas line, we found a serious gas leak in the pipe behind the gas range. It was leaking gas right into the house. This is a huge fire risk especially so close to open flame on the gas range. In addition to the fire risk, the family has been breathing in gas in the kitchen. Least important but still worth mentioning, this leak has been running up their gas bill substantially.

We shut off the gas line and quickly identified the problem. The pipe that connects the gas line to the house with the gas range was loosely attached and was leaking gas at each connection. We installed a new pipe and used Teflon sealing tape around the threading and tightened the pipe with a pope wrench. It was that simple. We re-ran the gas detector test and no gas was detected. Problem solved and potential crisis averted.