Friends I need your advice. A family member is in the process of buying a house and the home inspector’s report showed high Radon concentrations. The average level was 6 and according to the EPA this is considered high enough for concern. Dose anyone have any experience with high Radon levels in their house. From my research high radon is a manageable situation but I wanted to see if their are any real world examples of SDMB members who have dealt with this problem.
We have radon treatment in our home. We had elevated water levels and borderline air levels in the basement. We put in a GAC water treatment system and hoped that this would also have a slight impact on the air levels (which didn’t technically exceed the standards). The biggest hassle has been that the water treatment has reduced the water pressure in our water system (well water). If I had it all to do over, I would not have gone with what we did (due to a number of reasons), and I would have offered less money/asked for more money off the asking price. But I was a stupid first-time buyer.
I don’t know where your family member lives, but in most radon-affected areas there are tons of companies who claim they can fix your radon issues. Choose very carefully.
Now that you are reminding me, it’s about time I retest the air…
At the advice of my Realtor, I had my house tested for radon before I bought it. I don’t remember what the reading was but it was high enough to require treatment.
Also at the advice of my Realtor (who kicks ass), I stipulated that the sellers should take care of the radon problem before I bought. Her reasoning was that even though I probably wasn’t going to die of radon poisoning, if I went to sell the place the new buyers would also see the high reading and make ME fix it. So better get it fixed “free.”
So I go to visit the house sometime later and a dude’s in the basement putting up the radon mitigation system. He tells me they tried to put it in the basement floor but water came up out of the hole so they patched it and started installing the system in the wall.
Now I have this huuuge ugly pipe coming up out of the basement wall, out of the side of the house and running all the way up to the roof on the outside. It is the view from my bedroom window, in fact. And I’m told that the wiring on the thing is kind of shoddy, too (they didn’t ground it or something). I don’t even turn it on because I don’t want to waste electricity and I don’t want to hear the damn fan underneath my bed.
So my advice for your relatives:
- Get the sellers to pay for it.
- Make sure your relative approves the system they are going to install before they install it. Or else they’ll hate their house just a little bit more, like I do.