Will my gas system carry another appliance?
Maybe, and it is worth knowing before you buy the appliance. Every gas system has a fixed capacity set by the meter, the pipe diameter, and the distance gas travels. Add a load past that ceiling and you don’t get a dramatic failure. You get a tankless heater that can’t hold temperature, or a range that burns lazy and yellow while the dryer runs.
Rough input figures, so you can do the arithmetic before we get there:
| Appliance |
Typical input |
What it usually means |
| Clothes dryer |
About 22,000 BTU/hr |
Small load, usually absorbs fine |
| Range or cooktop |
About 65,000 BTU/hr |
Fine on most systems with capacity left |
| Tank water heater |
30,000–50,000 BTU/hr |
Already on the system; matters when you swap it |
| Tankless water heater |
Up to about 199,000 BTU/hr |
The common culprit — often needs a bigger line |
| Pool heater or generator |
250,000 BTU/hr and up |
Frequently needs its own run, sometimes a bigger meter |
What if the meter is the bottleneck?
Then the pipe we install isn’t the fix, and we’ll tell you that instead of selling you a run that won’t solve it. Everything up to and including the gas meter belongs to the utility. If the meter itself is too small for what you’re adding, upsizing it is their work and their timeline, not ours.
We’ll size the system, show you where it lands, and tell you which side of the meter the problem is on. What we can do is run the line at a diameter that carries the load over its real length, which solves more capacity complaints than people expect. And if the line you already have has failed rather than run short, that’s gas line repair, a different job with the same test at the end.
How long does a new gas line take?
A straight run off the main to one appliance is about half a day. A whole-house gas repipe is two days.
A real share of that second day is sheetrock. Getting to old pipe means opening walls and ceilings, and there is almost always more of that than people picture going in. What stretches the calendar past the labor is the inspection — a new line can’t be covered or put into service until an inspector has read the gauge himself.
Does propane change the job?
We run both. Plenty of property out past the city limits sits outside utility gas service and runs off an LP tank instead of a meter, and that’s normal work here rather than an exception.
The pipe, the fittings and the pressure test are the same trade either way. What changes is the supply pressure the system is designed around, where the fuel comes from, and who you call when it’s down. For natural gas, every job gets a permit — there is no small-enough category that skips one. Propane is handled differently, since an LP system on private property isn’t tied into a city utility the same way. Once a line is in and tested, connecting the appliance is the short part.