The Threat Of Radon And How You Can Avoid It

When you have a new home, getting the radon tested in it is hugely important. If you’re having a sump pump put in or replaced, any sump pump installation company will recommend the same. As any sump pump installation company will be well aware of, radon can originate from around a sump pump. Even directly after the process that a sump pump installation company will complete in installing such a thing, radon can be present. Therefore, any given sump pump installation company is likely to recommend that you hire a radon testing service to conduct a radon test in your home.

Even if a sump pump installation company has not recently been utilized, a residential radon testing service is still likely to be ideal if you have not had radon test results for quite some time. After all, radon levels are higher than you might imagine even in homes where the work of a sump pump installation company is not particularly recent. The data gathered on the subject more than supports this claim, showing that around one fifteenth of all homes in the United States have been found to have radon levels exceeding the action level set by the Environmental Protection Agency – or at least meeting it, which can still be considered to be quite dangerous.

But heeding the advice for radon testing, often given by your local sump pump installation company, means that first you must understand the threat that radon poses. After all, if radon is odorless, colorless, and tasteless, what danger could it really bring. The answer is this: quite a great deal of danger indeed. This is due to the fact that radon and lung cancer are closely linked, with radon now designated as the second leading cause of lung cancer in this country, at least according to the Surgeon General of the United States. This means that apart from tobacco usage radon causes more cases of lung cancer than anything else in this country, leading to as many as 20,000 deaths over the course of just one single year. There is no doubting the devastating impact that this can and does have on the lives of so many people throughout the country, from the victims themselves to their loved ones. Ultimately, the price of radon exposure, especially long term radon exposure, is a high one.

So what will happen once you take the advice of your sump pump installation company and call a radon testing and inspection company? They will use one of two tests to detect for radon in your home. Typically, a short term test will be utilized. This test will be able to detect the radon levels in your home for 90 days, which amounts to a period of nearly three months. But if further testing is needed, a long term radon detector can be utilized past this period. These two tests will likely be able to give an accurate portrayal of radon in your home – and will show whether or not action will be needed to lower these radon levels.

And what will be done if radon is found in your home, found at levels that are considered to be unsafe? Fortunately, while this is a very frightening thing to find out, there are steps that can be taken to considerably reduce radon levels, bringing them back down to safe amounts at the very least. For instance, it has even been discovered that passive methods of radon mitigation can alone bring radon levels down by as much as 50% when conducted in the typical residential home. And if radon levels are still in need of lowering, something like a radon ventilation fan can be effectively utilized to further cut down on the levels of radon – and therefore on the risk of lung cancer faced by the inhabitants of the home in question.

Though radon can pose a very serious threat to human health, one that should be taken seriously, there are ways in which managing radon can bring down this risk dramatically, if not entirely. In the end, radon management methods matter.