expired Posted by phoinix | Staff • Jan 4, 2025
Jan 4, 2025 2:03 AM
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expired Posted by phoinix | Staff • Jan 4, 2025
Jan 4, 2025 2:03 AM
Airthings Corentium Home Portable Radon Detector (223)
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One, trying to seal up all the holes that allow air exchange between under the house and inside the house. This includes walls when there is a gap behind the wall that goes to the crawl, like where sewer vent pipes come up.
Two, puling the air out from under the house before it can diffuse up into the living space. This means an exhaust fan. The problem here is that if you pull too much air out, especially if there are a lot of holes into the living space, that exhaust pulls air out of the living space, which will massively jump your heating or cooling bills up. Mitigation contractors will often lay plastic sheeting down in the crawl and put air intake pipes under it, but then no one can ever work in the crawl again because you'll poke holes in the plastic sheeting by crawling over it and it's now worthless. But sealing the holes between crawl and living space is hard because there are a lot of them and they're often behind cabinets. There's no magic to it.
You probably live in a warm area, where crawlspaces are vented.
Anywhere that winter temperatures drop significantly below freezing, venting the crawlspace enough to get rid of radon would cause your pipes to freeze.
Most areas with significant radon risk freeze during winter. Here's the EPA's US map:
https://www.epa.gov/radon/epa-map-radon-zones
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Let's frame it better. The airborne radon particles are dangerous because they come to rest in your lungs, and then decay emitting alpha radiation. That radiation, if it runs into the DNA in a lung cell, is very likely to start a cancerous tumor.
Do radon particles come to rest easily on cellulose filters used in air purifiers? One in a million might, but reducing radon by 0.0001% when you need to reduce it by 95% to get the risk level back down to 'safe' is just not remotely realistic. You would literally need a thousand air filters to make a difference. Same as the idea of 'catching' it while removing humidity from the air. The radon came out of wet ground in the first place, it's not hydrophilic in any way. You might catch a few particles out of a million but nothing that moves the needle.
Let's frame it better. The airborne radon particles are dangerous because they come to rest in your lungs, and then decay emitting alpha radiation. That radiation, if it runs into the DNA in a lung cell, is very likely to start a cancerous tumor.
Do radon particles come to rest easily on cellulose filters used in air purifiers? One in a million might, but reducing radon by 0.0001% when you need to reduce it by 95% to get the risk level back down to 'safe' is just not remotely realistic. You would literally need a thousand air filters to make a difference. Same as the idea of 'catching' it while removing humidity from the air. The radon came out of wet ground in the first place, it's not hydrophilic in any way. You might catch a few particles out of a million but nothing that moves the needle.
Master Class in session: It is not the radon gas that I'm am talking about, or trying to trap, but rather the radioactive alpha particles released into the air as a result of radon decay. Three of the most common types of radioactive decay are alpha, beta, and gamma. Gamma is "energy" and mostly goes right through you. Alpha is a large "particle" (compared to beta) and the most dangerous type of ionizing radiation because it can get stuck in your lungs. Beta is something in between. The trapping process for these alpha particles from utilizing air filters (unlike your lungs) is mainly electrostatically (electrostatic capture). Have you ever had a tiny speck of Styrofoam on your hand that you just can't flick off? Same principle here, and plastics, fiber glass, and other filter materials can trap electrostatically more effectively than your hands. Furnace filters, including filters of your humidifier (most have filters) should be able to capture these alpha particles electrostatically, whether they are labeled as "electrostatic air filters" or not. These filters have plenty of surface area for radioactive alpha particles to get "electrostatically" trapped onto them when indoor air is blown through them with an inexpensive box fan 24/7 or whenever you have elevated radon measurements. This is a simple and inexpensive DYI. It is in no means a replacement for a sub-slab vapor mitigation system along with fixing the cracks and sealing of the entire floor slab, if possible.
However the radon particles (pre-alpha) are referred to radionuclides and they do not behave the same way. They float in the air much like nitrogen and argon floats along, and at a random time (quantum physics kicks in here) they will decay and emit an alpha particle.
Bottom line, you need to stop the radon from getting in your lungs. You can only do that by forcing it outside your home instead of keeping it inside. No other filtration process is effective.
https://www.airthings.c