Smell of gas near the fireplace: what to do first in Fort Collins

If you smell gas near your fireplace, stop reading and leave the house. Take everyone and the pets out, leave the door open behind you, and do not touch a light switch, a thermostat, a garage door opener, or an appliance on the way. From outside and away from the building, call your natural gas utility’s emergency line or 911. Xcel Energy is the natural gas utility named on Larimer County’s utility-provider list; in Greeley and parts of Weld County it is Atmos Energy. Either way the number is on your gas bill, the response is around the clock, and it does not cost you anything.

A fireplace company is the second call, not the first.

Check this first: nothing

This is the one page on this site with no do-it-yourself step. Do not hunt for the smell with a lighter or a match. Do not spray soapy water on fittings. Do not open the bottom louver. Do not turn a ceiling fan on to clear the air, because the switch is a spark. Do not shut the gas off at the meter unless the utility tells you to on the phone. Every one of those is a small ignition source in a room that may have gas in it.

Two exceptions worth knowing. If the fireplace is on propane and the tank valve is outside, you may close it on your way out, but only if it is genuinely outside and on your way. And if the smell is faint and you are certain it started when the fireplace lit, and it is gone within a minute, that is combustion odor rather than raw gas. When in doubt, treat it as a leak.

What is usually leaking

Once the utility has cleared the house, this is what a fireplace technician actually finds.

The ranges are the same ones on the pricing page, and the safety inspection and leak check at $125 to $250 is the visit that finds a small leak before it becomes an evacuation.

Why this comes up in Fort Collins

The seasonal cycle works fittings. A fireplace that runs hard from November to February and then sits cold from April to October goes through a wide temperature swing every year. Brass fittings and older flex connectors move with it. Twenty-five and thirty-year-old direct-vent units in the south Fort Collins and Harmony corridor subdivisions are exactly the age where a fitting that has been fine for two decades starts to weep.

Retrofits and remodels. Old Town masonry fireplaces and the 1970s ring were mostly converted to gas log sets after the fact. Any joint made by somebody in a crawl space in 1994 is a joint worth checking. Colorado licenses plumbers for gas piping at the state level, and Fort Collins issues a specific Gas Piping trade license to “install piping and fittings for supplying fuel-gas,” which is the license the work should have been done under.

October. The first fire of the season is when small leaks get noticed, because it is the first time in six months anyone is standing in front of the fireplace paying attention. That is also why fall annual service includes a combustible gas detector sweep of the valve, the fittings, and the firebox.

After the utility has been

The utility will either find and stop the leak, or shut the gas off at the appliance or the meter and leave it red-tagged. What they do not do is repair your fireplace or turn it back on. That is the second call.

Send the model number from the rating plate inside the bottom louver, say what the utility told you, and say whether the gas is currently shut off. Our tech re-checks the whole appliance with a combustible gas detector at the valve, the flare fittings, the pilot tubing, and the firebox, takes a carbon monoxide reading, inspects the vent termination and clearances, repairs or replaces what failed, and only then relights and test-fires the unit. You get the readings in writing. A fireplace that has leaked once does not go back into service on somebody’s word that it looks fine.