Gas Leak Detection

When you think you can smell gas

Natural gas has no smell of its own, so a scent is added to it, usually described as rotten eggs or sulphur. If you can smell that indoors, treat it as real until someone has checked. Open windows and doors, keep naked flames away, leave light switches and other electrical items alone, and turn the supply off at the meter if you can reach the lever safely. If the smell is strong, get everyone out of the property first and make the call from outside.

Not every leak announces itself that clearly. A slow weep at a joint can sit below the level you would ever notice by nose, and the first sign is something else entirely: a boiler that keeps dropping out, a burner flame gone lazy and yellow, sooting around an appliance, or a meter that creeps when nothing in the house is running.

A smell that comes and goes is still a smell of gas. It usually means the leak is small, not that it is imaginary.

How the leak is actually found

The first job on arrival is the property itself: whether it is safe to be in, whether the supply needs isolating at the meter, and whether the area needs ventilating before anything else happens. Only then does testing start.

We begin at the meter with a tightness test, letting the installation stand under pressure and watching whether it holds. That tells us whether gas is genuinely escaping and gives a sense of the scale, which shapes where we look next. From there it is methodical: appliances isolated one at a time to see whether the loss follows a particular one, then along the pipework itself with a gas detector and leak-detection solution on joints, valves and connections. Where pipe runs disappear under floors, behind boxing or into the ground, the route is traced rather than guessed at.

Confirming there is a leak is the easy part. Pinning down exactly where it escapes is the actual job.