Radon is a serious health hazard, so it is important to take steps to get rid of it in your home. How do you get rid of radon in your house? You can do a few things to mitigate radon in your home.
You can seal any cracks or openings in the foundation and walls. You can also install a ventilation system to remove the gas from your home. How does radon get into your home? Radon enters buildings either from the ground beneath or from building materials used in construction through small cracks and holes in walls and floors or other openings in the building envelope.
Radon can also be found around granite, marbles, and other stones. Studies have shown that radon gas is one of the causes of lung cancer, second only to smoking. How do you know if you have radon?
To test for radon is the only way to know if you have elevated radon levels in your workplace or home. How do you test for radon in your house? There are two types of tests, short-term tests, which measure the level of radon over two to seven days, and long-term tests, which measure the level of radon over three months to a year.
Radon is a naturally occurring radioactive gas that seeps up through the ground in most parts of the country. Because radon is harmful to your health and can cause cancer with prolonged exposure, you need to ensure the levels in your home are low. The best way to do that is to have residential radon testing done.
If you live in an area where homes have basements, then you definitely should avail yourself of the services of a radon testing company. Because radon is in the soil, it tends to make its way into your home more easily if you have a basement. Even without a basement, though, you still could have higher-than-recommended radon levels in your home. It is estimated that at least one in 15 homes in the U.S. has radon levels above the acceptable level of 4 pCi/l recommended by the Environmental Protection Agency.
A radon test is no that intrusive or that expensive. A residential radon testing company will place a device on the lowest level of your home to take readings, which usually takes one to two days. During that time you have to keep all your windows closed and enter and exit the home as little as possible. A radon test usually costs a few hundred dollars and you should get the results back in a week.
If the test does show high levels of radon, it is imperative that you take care of the problem. You can have both passive and active radon mitigation systems installed. Such systems are set up to vent the air containing radon out of your home. Passive systems can reduce radon in your home by up to 50%. If you add an active system with a ventilation fan, it can increase the radon reduction even more. Such systems can cost anywhere from several hundred to more than a thousand dollars, but they are well worth it to get radon out of your home.
Radon is an odorless and colorless gas, so it is impossible to know if it is present in your home without having a test done. Long-term exposure to radon has been linked to radon, and the gas is considered the second-biggest cause of lung cancer after smoking. Scientists estimate that that doing residential radon testing and then installing a radon abatement system in your home if necessary can reduce the number of lung cancer deaths by 5,000 annually.
