Testing for Radon
“Radon in my house? No way!”
“We don’t have any medical issues, so radon can’t be a problem for us.”
“Radon? That’s just the latest false alarm.”
Comments like these are all too common among Wisconsin homeowners. And that’s truly alarming, because most homes in southern and central Wisconsin have elevated levels of this proven class A carcinogen – levels which are at least as dangerous as smoking a pack of cigarettes a day, and can be far worse.
Your neighbors’ levels may or may not be similar to yours; it depends on exactly where your house is located, and how deeply your basement has been dug. In fact, there’s only one way to find out what your home’s radon levels are, and that’s to test for it.
Radon testing is very affordable. And it doesn’t take much time: The test equipment can be set up in as little as five minutes; collecting the equipment, and the data it has gathered, takes another five minutes two to four days later.
Testing is always conducted in the lowest livable area of your home – often, the basement. Since the radon level from one side of a basement to another can vary by as much as 300%, we usually recommend testing at least two areas simultaneously to ensure the most accurate possible results. Additionally, a portion of this radon from the basement makes its way to the upper “living quarters” of the house.
Typical radon rates in upstairs areas are 50%-100% of the basement. Because of this, we highly recommend also testing a room on each floor above the basement to verify what radon rate a family may be living in while in the house.
The test can be performed with charcoal canisters, liquid scintillation bottles, alpha detectors, continuous monitors, or e-perms. The collection method doesn’t matter; performed properly, they deliver equally accurate results.
One possible exception: "self-diagnostic" devices such as continuous monitors, which can't be calibrated outside of a lab. Testers using this sort of device should provide some assurance of their equipment's accuracy. For example, they might run a concurrent charcoal-canister measurement every 10 tests or so. Or they may operate several devices constantly in their own homes or offices, so that they can compare the readings and promptly recalibrate any device that begins to show a different reading. In any case, they should have an assurance program, and be able to tell their clients how they “know” their results are accurate.
The accuracy issue is very real with these instruments; self-diagnostic devices have been found to be as much as 400% out of calibration when their results were compared with tests run through a certified lab. If a tester uses one of these devices in your home without the sort of validation described here, you can end up with either a false negative result that gives you an equally false sense of security … or a false positive result, in which case you might spend hundreds of dollars on a mitigation that was in reality unnecessary.