Radon: the hidden shop danger!

cueman

cueman

AzB Silver Member
Silver Member
For those of you who have shops in your basement or a concrete slab floor shop I would encourage you to get a home Radon test and get it checked. I bought one 10 years ago when I bought our new place. We never got around to using it. My late wife died 4 years later of lung cancer and was not a smoker. Recently we finally bought another test from Home Depot and tested our basement shop. It came back 67.1 and anything above 4 is considered unsafe. Radon is the second main cause of lung cancer and first main cause among non smokers. I am not sure if my late wife got lung cancer from Radon or not, but I sure wish I had tested sooner. It cost us a little over a thousand dollars to have a radon mitigation system installed. I wish I had taken care of this a long time ago. Hopefully with ten years of breathing this radioactive gas I won't have any health problems from it. My new wife has been here 4 and a half years so I hope she will be okay also.
Here is a link for more information on Radon Gas in homes:
http://www.epa.gov/radon/pubs/citguide.html
 
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WOW........ 67.1 versus 4 is a fricking HUGE difference !!! Is there a way to get checked to see if Radon is in your system ?? Hopefully you or your current wife haven't been affected and hopefully you can get the system installed.
 
Dirtbmw20 said:
WOW........ 67.1 versus 4 is a fricking HUGE difference !!! Is there a way to get checked to see if Radon is in your system ?? Hopefully you or your current wife haven't been affected and hopefully you can get the system installed.
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We got the mitigation (Radon removal) system installed Friday, but have not been to doctors to get our lungs checked. Pet scans are pretty expensive.
 
How does the system remove the radon? Air circulation, carbon filters?? I have not seen one before.
 
Chris Byrne said:
How does the system remove the radon? Air circulation, carbon filters?? I have not seen one before.
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I installed one in my basement. The systems are simple and cheap to build. Search for videos about building a radon system. The idea is to pull a constant vacuum under your basement floor. Sealing all the cracks is the hard part.
 
Chris Byrne said:
How does the system remove the radon? Air circulation, carbon filters?? I have not seen one before.
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They drill through the slab install pipe and pull a vacuum under the slab to reduce how much gets into the house. Or if you have a house that has it they will lay plastic in your crawl space and pull the vacuum under that. They mount a fan outside that runs 24/7 from now on. They want to get the level under 4 and can usually get it under 2 from what I have read.
 
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Graciocues said:
I installed one in my basement. The systems are simple and cheap to build. Search for videos about building a radon system. The idea is to pull a constant vacuum under your basement floor. Sealing all the cracks is the hard part.
Click to expand...

Where can we buy radon fans at?
 
My radon fan died a couple weeks before the Settlement date of the house I was selling. I bought a brand-new identical replacement fan from eBay. I think it was about $125. I believe the local dealers wanted something like $400.
 
Chris, I lost both My parents to lung cancer, You may remember... I did the cue work but in the beginning My father helped finance, and also drummed up a lot of business for us. I lost him a few years back, and just lost My mom about 10-11 months ago.

They were both smokers though. battled with quitting several times, but my dad never was able to completely beat them. My mom on the other hand was finally able to quit after being hospitalized. When she got out she changed her diet and quit smoking for over a year, and then after all that struggle to beat them she still developed lung cancer.

This is a good public service announcement that you are putting out so to to speak, I hope that It motivates people to check into it. I've lived through many hard knocks in life, lost many good friends and family, all were hard to take, but the worse By far was watching these 2 loved ones that were always there for Me through good and bad times in a lot of pain while battling with this disease, and not being able to do anything about It. It's a very helpless feeling. Still not a day goes by when I don't have moments of depression And/or feelings of guilt related to It. At this point I'm not sure there ever will be, because part of them lives in me, and things I say, think, or do always remind me of them.

Both of our homes have concrete floors, and have never been tested, but we are now buying a double wide on about an acre of land that I'm working on now. That to serve as a temporary place until the sale of these 2 homes are completed. Not sure if the permanent places will be modular in design, or built on a slab. If they are built on a slab though, then this is something that I will be checking into during inspections.

Greg
 
Thanks for the heads up. Radon testing in my part of the country was a big deal a few years back.

Our city was built on gumbo and it doesn't matter how new your home is, eventually the ground will heave and leave cracks in the basement floor.

I filled the cracks in the small shop with a rubberized type of grout but still need to do a check.

Home Depot should have test kits.

If I were to look on EBay, is there a brand name that I should look for?

Thanks.
 
Thanks for that post

Thanks for the heads up post Chris. My mother died of lung cancer and was a non smoker so did my sister but she was a smoker. They both died of identical "non small cell lung cancer" HEREDITY. Regards, Al
cueman said:
For those of you who have shops in your basement or a concrete slab floor shop I would encourage you to get a home Radon test and get it checked. I bought one 10 years ago when I bought our new place. We never got around to using it. My late wife died 4 years later of lung cancer and was not a smoker. Recently we finally bought another test from Home Depot and tested our basement shop. It came back 67.1 and anything above 4 is considered unsafe. Radon is the second main cause of lung cancer and first main cause among non smokers. I am not sure if my late wife got lung cancer from Radon or not, but I sure wish I had tested sooner. It cost us a little over a thousand dollars to have a radon mitigation system installed. I wish I had taken care of this a long time ago. Hopefully with ten years of breathing this radioactive gas I won't have any health problems from it. My new wife has been here 4 and a half years so I hope she will be okay also.
Here is a link for more information on Radon Gas in homes:
http://www.epa.gov/radon/pubs/citguide.html
Click to expand...
 
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