No gas: the meter. Episode forty-four of the Gas Service Animated series.

The meter on the side of the house is a mechanical pump, run by the gas itself. Two fabric diaphragms sit back to back, splitting the case into four chambers; as one fills, the one behind it empties, so the flow never stops. Slide valves shuttle the ports in a fixed four-stroke order, and a crank turns that motion into the dial you read, in cubic feet. It needs no power — the gas does the work.

Here's the thing techs get wrong about the meter: it rarely gives you no gas. Because the diaphragms are driven by the gas, a worn or even torn meter usually keeps passing gas — it just stops counting it correctly. The classic sign of a bad meter isn't a dead house. It's gas flowing while the dial barely moves.

Walk the failures. A diaphragm fatigues and cracks after twenty-five or thirty years of cycling — gas leaks between chambers and the meter under-registers. Worn or scored slide valves, chewed up by rust and scale, let gas slip past the measuring stroke, so it runs slow. A seized index or a bound crank jams the dial while gas still flows. An internal case leak bypasses the chambers entirely and reads near zero. None of those is a dead house — they're a dial problem.

So when does the meter actually give you no gas? Three ways. The meter valve is off, locked, or tagged out by the utility — by far the most common. Moisture inside a low-pressure meter freezes in winter and blocks it — no gas when it's cold, back when it warms. Or, rarely, something seizes hard enough to choke the flow. Notice: two of those three aren't the diaphragm at all.

You settle it by clocking the meter. Isolate one appliance, run it, and time the smallest test dial. Cubic feet per hour equals thirty-six hundred times the dial size, divided by the seconds per revolution. No movement with a known load running means the meter isn't registering. And check the pressure while you're there — if the inlet holds but the outlet's gone, your problem is past the meter, at the regulator, not the diaphragm.

The winter meter deserves its own note. Water vapor rides in all gas; when it collects in the meter or its regulator and the temperature drops below freezing, it turns to ice and stops the gas. The tell is that it tracks the weather — dead on the coldest morning, fine by afternoon. The cure is thaw and dry and find where the water's coming from, not just wait for spring.

And the hard rule on the meter: it isn't yours. The meter, its valves, the swivels, the riser, and the regulator are utility property. Your job is to prove the symptom — clock it, read the pressures, rule the meter in or out — and then hand it to the utility. Changing a meter, unlocking one, or operating a locked set is utility work.

A quick call. Furnace and water heater both dead, pilots out. Inlet pressure's there, meter valve's on — but you clock a running load and the dial doesn't budge, and the outlet manometer reads almost nothing. Meter's passing nothing and counting nothing. You've proven it at the meter — now it's the utility's meter to change.

The meter in one breath. It's a gas-driven pump that measures fixed volumes — so it usually fails by mis-counting, not by stopping gas. No gas from a meter means the valve's off or locked, or it's frozen. Clock it and read the pressures to prove it. And it's the utility's to change. Next: the regulator.