Last year the wife of one of my neighbors died from lung cancer. Never smoked a day in her life. In February, they had their house tested for radon. The levels came back at 8, twice the maximum exposure. They are the original owners and have lived there for close to 20 years. Mine came back at 6.1 so next month a radon mitigation company is paying me a visit to install their system. My neighbor has the AirAnything and his radon levels occasionally hits 16. A test kit is $30 off Amazon and you get two kits. Free lab testing is including.

Yes Radon is common in North Alabama. Had my house tested in Elkmont before I bought it. Bad stuff. My kids half brother has it in house in TX, he was getting sick from it and did not know they had a Radon issue until after he tested house.

is it one of those things where you sell your house and tell the new buyers afterwards"btw is got radon" or do you just not say anything and let them die of lung cancer.

You should make it know to any buyer before sale of house if you have any integrity and human decency. Of course Alabama does not require problems to be disclosed to the buyer, which is BS. Most states make a seller disclose any know issue with a house before the sell it. Radon can be mitigated if house is built on a crawl space but it is expensive. I think on a slab you are screwed but I maybe wrong.

The only thing Athens city required of us when we built our home was to run a 3” pvc vent from under our slab that exited the roof. I didn’t know it at the time and had to retrofit it before they would sign off so it can be done with a bit of effort. I’m thinking a Radon mitigation company is going to seriously screw someone for something you can do yourself for $100 and a bit of work.

Could you mitigate it with a 1/16” sheet of lead under the flooring?

Thanks for the PSA. I’ve never heard of such a thing.

I use to do a lot of Radon mitigation. If on a crawlspace, you use a heavy layer of plastic in the crawlspace. Lay it down and seal it to all the walls, all the columns and etc. underneath the plastic you have a series of pipes that tie into a small fan that vents it outside. There’s really not much to it, but I doubt it’s cheap now a days. We saw real results when measuring before and after.

On a slab house, you core drill several holes through the slab in unused areas, backs of closets and such and send the pipe strait up and out of the roof.

When my wife and I were home shopping in Columbia, Mo were came across numerous homes that had gone through the remediation process. We always ruled those places out just because it was creepy. But, we often joked that those were probably the safest houses.