After going on and on about how healthy we tried to make our new home, we got some bad news today. We had a radon test performed by our home inspector. He placed it in the basement for 48 hours. The EPA sets the safety level for homes at 4 piC/L. Our home’s level was 13! Radon gas is colorless and oderless, and is the second leading cause of lung cancer after cigarette smoking, according to the EPA. Most radon enters the home from the ground below and surrounding it. It looks like mitigation is a fairly painless process–it should take less than one day to install some pipes and fans and should cost us less than 1k. I will post again once we’ve gone through it and I know more.
Have you tested your home? Anyone gone through mitigation before? Please comment if you have. The EPA estimates that radon causes 21,000 cancer deaths each year so if you haven’t had your home tested, maybe you should. I hear that you can purchase fairly inexpensive kits from Home Depot and Lowes to test for radon yourself (don’t know the accuracy of these) or you can hire a home inspector as we did.
Posted by jimmy on October 15, 2008 at 5:38 am
My only recommendation is to pay the extra expense for a professional radon test. This is the type of thing best left to the experts. If it is any consolation, it is very common to have high radon levels in basements in new homes.
Posted by Health, Taken Seriously » Updates on August 1, 2009 at 4:57 pm
[...] – We had a company mitigate our high radon levels (more than 3x the EPA’s allowable limit). It was super easy and not that [...]