Monthly Archives: June 2012

Although this isn’t anything I accomplished, I felt the need to share with you the end result of my 2 gas line saga.  If you remember back in September 2011 (I know you don’t, its OK),  I was demo’ing the old work bench and cleaning up the front of the basement.  At that time I discovered that there were two gas lines in my house.  One coming in from the street and feeding my meter, and another going through the wall to my neighbors house.  Knowing this seemed awry, I began contacting BGE…several times actually.  I posted about it on my blog here in this post and received a starting response from a reader.

They posted this link on their blog “Our New Front Door” regarding their travails with BGE and their two gas lines.  After several repeated attempts at getting BGE to admit it wasn’t right, I received this response:

“Thank you for contacting BGE regarding your concern.

I have had our Gas Dispatcher review your information. The type of service you have is called a branch service. The main line in the street runs can run through a neighbor’s home to reach your home. This is a common practice in plumbing and we have literally thousands of customers who are connected in this manner. It is safe and an effective way to provide gas to our customers.”

Call me crazy, but after reading a fellow blogger’s account of that whole situation, I wanted mine fixed, and they didn’t seem to want to do it.  So here we are almost a year later and BGE is upgrading the gas mains throughout Locust Point.  I receive a door tag and scheduled an appointment.  When the guys showed up to install the main in the street on my block this week they informed me they may not be able to work on my house that day because….whats that you say?  My neighbors gas line goes through my house and if they turn mine off my neighbor’s will go off.  Oh really??  And they haven’t contacted you to schedule an appointment???  Thats great, I’m glad I worked from home today for this nonsense. 

Often times my rants don’t have a happy ending, but some how this one does.  Somehow they got ahold of my neighbor and by 9 am they had started working.

The funniest thing about all of this is that one of the first things the guy said to me as he emerged from my basement the first time Thursday morning was “Oh and your gas line situation, we’re going to fix that, we’ll run a new line from your house to the street while we upgrade your meter.” 

I guess the bottom line is, if you have two gas lines in your basement, BGE will fix it when they want to, most likely whenver your neighborhood has its gas mains upgraded.  So bother them if you want, but it may take some time.  I can’t imagine how annoyed I would be if I were finishing the basement of my rowhouse and I had two gas lines, and I finished closing up the walls only to have them come by one day to upgrade the mains in the road and need to tear the walls apart. 

I hope this helps anyone searching the interwebs for help with their gas lines in Baltimore City.