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Learning A New Lesson

Last week, as I’ve mentioned, we were both consumed with my medical issues. This week . . it’s radon! I knew a little . . very little . . about radon up until Saturday but now I know a lot more about radon than I wish I knew. Yes, we had the house tested for radon before we bought it. One thing I’ve learned is that radon readings may be very low in the summer months and go very high in the winter months. The test was done in July. Another thing I’ve learned is that the closest folks who can install the mitigation systems are either in Kansas City or Springfield. None of them can get to us til after the first of the year, which seems like forever but really, it isn’t that long from now.

I am no expert . . honestly, I shouldn’t even be talking about this I know so little but the first reading we got in the basement was 12. Any reading over 2 is cause for further investigating. Any reading over 4 means remediation needs to be done ASAP. Vince asked one of the guys he talked to today what was the highest level he had ever worked on. He said he has a house coming up that has a level 68. Oh, my . . that’s very serious.

Another thing I’ve learned is that wearing a coat in the house in December isn’t so fun, especially when washing dishes or cross stitching (or taking a shower) because we have the windows open.

Another thing I’ve learned is that, since we’ve basically moved out of the basement, but still have to keep the upstairs windows open, little Oscar has never heard cars going down the road or dogs barking at daylight. He’s already nervous because we moved his crate upstairs where the numbers are lower. Yes, we moved Rita’s little fence up too. She rolls with the punches and as long as she has her bed and her blanket, and it isn’t thundering, she’s good.

Thankfully, we’re able to open windows in the sewing room just about an inch and put sticks in them so they can’t be opened any more and Boots has been able to stay in there. We took him upstairs and with Oscar flipping out, Boots was not happy. He’s ok up there for a while but when he’s ready to be left alone, he wanted to go back to the sewing room.

Looking ahead, I see a night when our low is going to be 12 degrees. I asked Vince . . are we still keeping the windows open during that night? Yep, add more quilts to the bed.

A neighbor has a mitigation system in his house. Vince went over this evening and talked to him about it. It was installed in his house in 2015 but he didn’t buy the house til early 2020 so he didn’t know a lot about the installation but at least it gave Vince an idea about what to expect.

It isn’t a big, unsightly system. My understanding is they drill a hole through the foundation and put fans under the house or maybe they just put pipes under the house and they hook the pipes up to fans and then they put a pipe through the roof and that vents the radon from under the house so hopefully, it isn’t seeping into the house.

Lucky for us, Jeremy and Angie took meticulous notes when building the house so they have been able to answer every question we’ve had – mostly questions asked by the mitigation guys. Jeremy asked Vince if he could read the 3.5″ floppy disks. Of course he can. He has every computer he’s ever owned. Jeremy will bring a box of disks over that have all the pictures of when the house was being built. Here’s something Jeremy told Vince . . they put about 12″ of gravel under the foundation because they knew they would be spending a lot of time in the basement and even with carpet, they didn’t want the floors to be cold. The mitigation guys were happy to hear that because having gravel under the foundation makes it a lot easier to pull the air out.

I never even thought about it but the tile floors in the basement aren’t even cold. Good job, Jeremy and Angie! 🙂

I’m almost afraid for next week to get here. Surely it will not bring more trouble!

In the end, it’s all ok. We hopefully discovered it before too much harm was done to humans or pets. We can get it fixed. I had kinda thought, in the back of my mind when we bought this house, that we should install a radon mitigation system because radon is fairly prevalent in this area but I knew that since the house passed the test, Vince wasn’t going to go for it so I never mentioned it.

There’s nothing Jeremy and Angie could have done to make things different. They say to get your houses checked every two years if you live in a high radon area. We’ve owned the house for more than two years. They didn’t even know the neighbors had installed a system in 2015.

Poor Vince . . he was on the phone all day yesterday with different people. People from the State of MO environmental division; people from probably five or six different mitigation companies; people who have had mitigation systems installed, several conversations . The people with the state were most helpful, seemed very knowledgeable and competent. Vince, being an engineer himself, was very pleasantly surprised.

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Comments

  1. Hopefully the mitigation installation will go smoothly for you. It reminds me that we should have our house tested again too.

    • They say it will take them about three hours for the entire installation. The guy said so long as there is gravel under the foundation and they don’t run into a footer, it should be a piece of cake. We have to get the electrician back out here to run a dedicated outlet with its own breaker so we can run it off a generator if there’s a long term power outage. But it’s mid-January before the radon people can do the installation so I’ll remind Vince to call the electrician today.

  2. We had ours installed a year ago. The neighbors had some problems so had their house tested. They had high numbers and notified the entire addition. We were in the teens, my studio is in the lower level so wasted no time getting abated. The system is tucked into the sump pump area and except for the occasional hum I don’t know it’s there.

    • They guy was here this morning and he said that’s usually what happens, one household finds out they have it, then others nearby get tested and before long, most of them are needing remediation. Ours will be in the basement garage so we should never know it’s running.

  3. I have never heard about this problem in my area in Texas . I will have to do some checking.

    • Don’t take my word for it but we were never concerned about it in central Texas. Houses without basements CAN have problems, but don’t nearly as often as basement houses.

      • Thanks. I pulled up a map and other information and it’s not normally a problem in my area. I learned something new today.

  4. Hope all goes well and quick with the mitigation system! Radon is prevalent in our area too so my husband bought a detector that we keep in our basement. We noticed after a rain the level increases but it’s only temporary and apparently that’s normal…who knew?

    • Cold and rain seems to cause it to run up here. It’s been warm and dry the last few days so our levels were below the safe range but since they will run up with today’s rain and the coming cold, at least we know to expect it.

  5. Since you told me about this, I was thinking…we had a fan in the crawl space under our house in CO…I bet that’s why it was there! Da! (Not the brightest bulb!)

  6. How did you decide to retest for radon? Did a neighbor tell you about their levels or did Vince read something and decided to test for it? Can you have a monitor that sends an alert to your phones if the level gets above a certain number?

    I hope that this wasn’t the cause of your recent health scare since I read the radon can result in lung cancer!!! Take care of yourself!

    • It had been a bit over two years since we had the house tested. For the most part, levels are lower in the summer and our house was tested in July as part of the pre-purchase inspection. We had planned to test it every two years, which is want is recommended but after doing a bit of research, decided having the house tested once every two years wasn’t going to give nearly as accurate of a reading than if we purchased a tester that is constantly testing the air in the house. So, we bought our own tester and, depending on the weather (cold, warm, wet, dry, high humidity, etc.), the numbers are fluctuating between 3 and 4, which was enough for us to decide to have the mitigation system installed. There will be days when our numbers may drop down to 1 and days when it may rise to 6 or 8 until we are able to get the system installed. For the most part, it’s staying right around 3. The system will be installed in mid-January.

      No, my medical issues weren’t lung problems.

    • I don’t know what all kinds of monitors are available. We bought one that has a readout. We do have an overall “air quality” monitor that reads to our phone. I haven’t messed with the radon monitor much. It’s a little gizmo about the size of a cell phone but a little thicker. It updates about every hour but gives a 30 day average. I prefer to kinda watch it because if it goes up to 12, I want to know and I don’t want to only know that my 30 day average was 2 last month and 8 this month. Not that I can change anything other than open some windows.

      They aren’t outrageously expensive but they aren’t what I would call inexpensive. I would like to have one in every room because moving them from room to room, while it will give you the hourly updates, it resets on the 30 day average. We’ve moved it around because we wanted to compare upstairs to downstairs but once we get the mitigation system in, they will tell us which room needs to have the monitor.

      Also, the State of MO will send out a test kit but only from October through March (or something like that) because those are the months the readings are likely to be high. There’s no charge for those test kits. We send them back, they read them and send us the results. I’m not sure which other states have something like that available but you could check.

  7. Oh my! I don’t know the consequences of Radon in or under your home, but it can’t be good! I am glad you caught it and something can be done for it. I have never heard of anyone around here having that problem but that doesn’t mean a thing! Just look at Georgetown! They have had to close a lot of businesses , including A Sheep at The Wheel. This is all due to the caverns being under the ground there and gas is leaking through them into the ground and making people sick! Also there is the chance that the building or home could explode! I hope it is not too bad and the cost will not be much. But we do what we have to do!

    • I don’t think radon is a problem there, at least in central Texas.

      The radon mitigation system is something we probably should have done as soon as we got here but didn’t so it will be nice to not have to worry about that.

      I didn’t know about the problems around Georgetown. That’s terrible.

  8. .I haven’t heard about radon for so long, I looked it up and found levels are so low in San Diego county that inspectors don’t even check for it. I’m sorry about your situation, but a happy to learn about here!

    • We knew there was always the chance our levels would go up – just part of living here. It is nice to know you don’t have to worry about it there.

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