Top-rated independent heating and cooling across North Texas and the Metroplex
Smelling Gas at Home
If you smell gas near your furnace, get everyone out of the house first and call 911 or your gas utility from outside. Do not stop to investigate. Once the gas company has shut things off and told you the house is safe, call us and we will come look at the furnace itself and find out what failed.
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By the Trinity Air & Heat service team · reviewed by our working technicians
Step One: Leave, Then Call From Outside
1. Get every person and pet out of the house. Walk out, do not run, and leave the door open behind you if you can do it without delay. 2. Once you are outside and well away from the building, call 911 or your gas utility's emergency line. The utility will come out and shut off the supply at the meter. 3. Stay outside until they tell you it is safe to go back in. That includes the garage and the front porch. 4. If anyone feels dizzy, has a headache, or is nauseated, tell the 911 dispatcher. Those can be signs of carbon monoxide exposure and need medical attention, not a phone call to an HVAC company. Everything else waits until those four steps are done.
What Not To Do While You Are Still Inside
Do not flip any light switch, on or off. Do not unplug anything, use a garage door opener, or start a car in an attached garage. A small spark is all it takes. Do not use your phone inside the house. Carry it out and dial from the yard or the sidewalk. Do not light a match, a lighter, or a candle to see better. Do not smoke. Do not go looking for the leak, do not open the furnace cabinet, and do not touch the gas valve or the shutoff at the meter. That is the utility's job and they have the tools to do it safely. Do not assume the smell will clear on its own if you crack a window and wait.
What A Gas Smell Near The Furnace Usually Means
Natural gas and propane get a sulfur odorant added on purpose so people notice them. If that rotten egg smell is strongest in the closet, hallway, or attic space where your furnace sits, the leak is likely at a fitting, the gas valve, a flex connector, or the union where the line meets the furnace. A cracked heat exchanger is a different problem and usually does not smell like gas at all. That one shows up as headaches, soot, or a carbon monoxide alarm going off, which is why a working CO alarm on every level matters through the heating season. Either way, diagnosis happens with instruments, not a nose.
When To Call Us, And What We Do Next
Call us after the gas utility has been out and shut off or made safe the supply. The utility stops the gas. They generally do not repair your furnace or relight and test the system, and that is where we come in. We serve homeowners across Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana. On a call like this we pressure test the gas piping at the furnace, check the valve and connectors, inspect the burners and heat exchanger, verify the flue is drafting the way it should, and test combustion before we hand the system back to you. If a part has to be replaced, we tell you what failed and why before we do the work. If the furnace is not safe to run, we say so plainly.
Preventing The Next One
Most gas leaks we find at a furnace start small and go unnoticed for weeks. An annual heating inspection catches loose connectors, corroded fittings, and a flue that has come apart at a joint. In this part of the country furnaces often sit in attics where nobody looks from March to November, so that yearly check does real work. Keep the area around the furnace clear. No storage boxes, no paint cans, no gasoline. Combustion air needs room and a fire needs nothing to help it along. Replace the batteries in your carbon monoxide alarms when you change the furnace filter, and replace the alarms themselves on the schedule printed on the back.
When it is time to book
Smelling Gas at Home — common questions
I only smell it a little. Do I still have to leave?
Yes. A faint smell can mean a small leak or a leak in a spot with some airflow. You cannot judge the size by the odor, so leave the house and call your gas utility from outside.
Can you find the leak faster than the gas company?
The utility's job is to make the gas supply safe and they respond to emergencies. Call them first, always. We follow up with combustion testing and the actual repair on the furnace and its gas piping.
My carbon monoxide alarm went off but I smell nothing. What now?
Get everyone outside and call 911. Carbon monoxide has no smell, so a sounding alarm is your only warning. After responders clear the house, call us to test the heat exchanger and flue.
How it works
- Step 1
Tell us the symptom
Call or fill in the quote form with what you hear, smell or feel. Warm air, short cycling, a breaker that keeps tripping. Details on your porch help us arrive with the right parts.
- Step 2
We diagnose on site
A technician checks the thermostat, airflow, the indoor coil and blower, then the outdoor unit and electrical side. You get a plain explanation of what failed and why it failed.
- Step 3
You approve the repair
We walk you through the fix and any parts involved before we start. Once you say go, we make the repair and confirm the system is holding temperature before we leave your driveway.
- A real person answers
- Open 7 days
- Written quote before work starts
Why homeowners call us
- Built for hard summersWe work on attic air handlers in July heat, undersized returns in older subdivisions, and condensers with hail-flattened fins. Those are everyday jobs across the region, so we know where these systems tend to give out first.
- Air conditioner repair and heating repairOne crew for both seasons. Air conditioning repair when the house won't cool, heater repair and furnace repair when the burners won't stay lit. Same technicians, same records, so nobody starts from scratch in November.
- We explain the failureYou hear which component failed and what it was doing to the rest of the system. If a repair is a short-term patch on an aging unit, we say so and let you decide the timing.
- Respect for the houseDrop cloths, shoe covers, and the attic hatch closed the way we found it. We keep the work area clean and we tell you honestly when a problem is airflow or ductwork rather than the equipment itself.
- All major brands, gas & electricOne independent crew for Carrier, Trane, Lennox, Goodman, Rheem and more.
- Straight answersIf a system is not worth repairing, we say so, often right on the phone.
About this guide
Safe checks done and it still misbehaves? That's a real fault
Bring your notes from the checks to the call and booking takes no time.
- A real person answers
- Open 7 days
- Written quotes
- All major brands
- Gas & electric
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