Here’s a map showing the varying percentage of homes in England and Wales with levels above government standards: http://wordpress.mrreid.org/2011/12/
And some of us have a background in hazmat and the nuclear power industry … :dubious:
The average radon exposure level in the United States is 1.3 pCi/L. The average radon exposure level in Warren County Ohio is 4.8 pCi/L, with 43% of the indoor air tested being higher than 4.0 pCi/L (The level at which the EPA recommends remediation) with another 25% being above 2.0 pCi/L.
When I sold my home there I had it remediated after the test. I’d have preferred to skip the test, and just remediate without it on general principles, because remediation is cheap, and helps even if the levels are down in the 2.0 pCi/L range, but I wasn’t paying for it, and the relocation company did it their way, test, remediation, retest. The whole thing came to less than $700, and the testing ended up being more expensive than the fix.
Not at all. My parents house in Sweden tested high for radon. Basement ventilation brought the levels down to an acceptable level. Radon is a big problem in Scandinavia.
We have it in some parts of the South-West here. It come from granite rocks, as I recall.
United Nuclear has a radon detector I use that I think reads out in pico-Cu/liter. My reading is usually somewhere between the mid 4’s and 5’s. I’ve checked against the EPA map for my area and as I recall it’s in the general ballpark.
First, welcome to this board. I hope that you find it as stimulating as I do!
IME, In My Experience, The local EPA personnel are NOT the sharpest tools in the shed. One thing that they should understand is that when a limit is set at xx ppm, dilution with an inert material will bring down the ppm count. It is simple math involved here. However I could not get our local EPA representative to understand this.
I would bet MONEY that most folks on this MB, either know this, or could be shown the math such that they would understand this.
Now, this is only one or two EPA personnel, but these folks are not the brightest. If they are smarter then the folks on this forum, we are in deep stuff!!
BTW, I lurked for quite a while before joining this MB. I rarely join MBs, as I do not have a lot of time to spend on them. I lurked for over two years before taking the plunge. I read a lot of the old threads. IMHO this is one of the MBs that is populated by some very intelligent posters.
Once again, Welcome!!
Marylander checking in. We bailed on a potential purchase because it failed inspection miserably (rot, asbestos). To add insult to injury, we had a radon test performed and it was at 10x max level considered safe. It was a finished basement too. I felt awful for the owners because they had their kids’ bedrooms in that basement.
Anybody who is considering buying a radon testing kit (or doing “remediation”) needs to educate themselves, i.e. don’t be a sucker. Read this: Radon: Truth vs. myth from REAL health physics scientists, not the EPA. A favorite saying of my Dad’s, (who worked on the Manhattan Project) “If all this stuff was really as dangerous as they say it is, we’d ALL be dead.” Enjoy your education.
Reading web pages made by random people disagreeing with official guidelines is not “educating yourself”. The average person is in no position to judge who is a “REAL scientist” and the internet is full of seemingly competent misinformation.
Is it possible the linear principle of risk is flawed for radiation, and radon level guidelines are unnecessarily low, sure, but unless one is an expert in the field one has no business trying to determine if that is so, and reading websites by purported experts is a particularly poor way of judging the issue.
Why don’t you bring him around to tell us himself?
To add this :http://www.radonkit.co.uk/pages/radon_in_cornwall.html
to the thread Radon is not uncommon in the UK, and probably worldwide.
Can’t immediately cite but a good look at geographical base rock, sorry no Geologist me!, might give you a better grasp.
P.
I told my daughter to do it when she bought her house in Northern Illinois, and the house failed. The sellers had to pay for remediation. I don’t think it’s a scam.
I live in Queensland, Australia. We typically don’t do cellars; I had to ask on this board what a “root cellar” was. Our traditional architecture is to build homes out of wood on stilts. And we tend not to close up even ground level rooms in winter. We don’t talk about radon as a problem here, but I suspect the reason is architecture rather than geology.
Here in Eastern Missouri probably 1 in 20 houses built in the last 30 years has had a remediation system installed. In some neighborhoods it’s more like 1 in 3. And plenty more haven’t been sold since they were built and hence most of those owners don’t know whether they have it or not.
Just another geographical data point here. I make no statement plus or minus on the ratio of actual health risk to the public’s perception of health risk nor on the wisdom (or lack of same) of official public policy.
Any company that does the testing, and then does the installation should be suspect. Why wouldn’t they want a positive? If you can do your own test, purchased at a hardware store, and then make your own decision about mitigation, at least you know the testers are not benefiting from a positive.
Can anyone backup the claim that radon gas is too heavy to be ventilated out?
It can be ventilated out. That’s almost always how mitigation is done. The trouble is that many newer houses are sealed up pretty tight, and so it doesn’t get ventilated out.
Despite your opinion there are plenty of reputable companies out there that do both testing and installation of radon mitigation equipment. Generally home owners are unreliable for accurate testing, if your testing for radon you want the test to be done by someone with expert knowledge of radon to ensure the perimeters of the testing fit the situation. If a company is installing equipment they need to test anyway to make sure they engineer the equipment correctly. It makes sense to have one reputable company do both the testing and treatment.
The reason a company wouldn’t want to report a positive and install equipment where no radon exists is it would be fraud to do so.
It is important to research any company you hire because there are fraudulent entities but to assume all entities would commit fraud if possible is unreasonably paranoid.
zombie or no
if you get a positive test from a company on your home then do a self test if you doubt it. follow the directions and if you get a positive test also you could feel it is OK.