Radon

 

I am familiar with radon. It is a radioactive gas produced by decaying uranium deposits underground and is particularly prevalent in some parts of this country but not mine. It has been linked to cancer especially in significant exposures and if one has comorbidities like being a smoker. The gas is heavier than air so tends to collect in basements of houses which are prevalent in my part of the world. But in this part of Iowa, radon isn't listed as being abundantly around and is more hit and miss in nature. One house can have a problem and another 100 yards away won't. One of the old farmhouses I spent my later teens in had a radon problem but my parents had a mitigation system put in to bring it down to safer levels.

When we moved into this house some twelve plus years ago, testing for radon did cross my mind but since this house, as with both houses I've owned, had a walk out basement. In my mind, it meant that any heavier than air radon that accumulated in the basement would simple exit or leak out the walk out door like we do and not build up in significant amounts to reach mouth/inhalation level. However, due to the recent diagnosis of my wife and a conversation with a friend, the topic of radon came up again and I decided perhaps I should test things just to be safe.

I bought a detector online and when it was delivered to my house, I plugged it in down in the basement and waiting the required 10 minutes for the first reading. It came up and was 0.9 picocuries per liter, well underneath the 4.0 threshold set by the EPA. So I meandered upstairs and was doing other things when I heard some sort of alarm going off in the basement. Long story short(er), it was the radon detector and over the course of several weeks, I could see that our radon levels were averaging from 4.0 picocuries per liter to 10.0 picocuries per liter, all over the EPA's threshold. 

We don't spend a lot of time in our basement but it is where my office/exercise room is located along with our wood stove which we use on select weekends throughout winter. Probably most importantly in my mind, due to the bedroom swap of a couple years ago, it is the location of the bedroom of my eldest daughter who although spends most of the year these days at college but will be back for summer break at some point and does like to stay holed up in her bedroom all day versus doing things with her parents! I certainly didn't want her to get dosed with higher than necessary levels of radon. So I called a radon mitigation guy in my area and made an appointment.

It is quite simple to mitigate for the gas. They drill a hole in your basement floor, stick a pipe down in it that gets sealed and vented to the outside via a powerful fan. The fan creates a vacuum of sorts underneath your foundation and pulls the radon up and out through the vent before it has a chance to seep in through your concrete floor. Above you can see the white pipe stuck into the hole in our concrete floor near(ish) to the center of our house. Below, is the fan mounted to the outside of the house and the vent stack where the radon gas will be expelled into the wild again where I think natural levels are around 0.4 picocuries per liter in these parts. Meanwhile, a valuable lesson was learned that one really shouldn't procrastinate about such things or make assumptions that a particular house is immune to such things. I hope I don't have to move anytime soon, but should I have to, I will definitely be taking my new little detector along with me to verify the radon levels first thing instead of waiting for another 12 years to do so.