Excessive Radon found during Home Inspection?

Breathing high concentrations of radon can cause lung cancer. Thus, radon is considered as a significant contaminant that affects indoor air quality worldwide. he EPA recommends homes be fixed if an occupant's long-term exposure will average 4 picocuries per liter or higher. Since radon has a half-life of four days, opening the windows once a day can cut the mean radon concentration to one fourth of its level.

Radon levels in indoor air can be lowered in a number of ways, from sealing cracks in floors and walls to increasing the ventilation rate of the building. The five principal ways of reducing the amount of radon accumulating in a house are:

Improving the ventilation of the house and avoiding the transport of radon from the basement into living rooms;

Increasing under-floor ventilation;

Installing a radon sump system in the basement;

Sealing floors and walls; and

Installing a positive pressurization or positive supply ventilation system.

The half-life for radon is 3.8 days, indicating that once the source is removed, the hazard will be greatly reduced within a few weeks.

Positive-pressure ventilation systems can be combined with a heat exchanger to recover energy in the process of exchanging air with the outside, and simply exhausting basement air to the outside is not necessarily a viable solution as this can actually draw radon gas into a dwelling. Homes built on a crawl space may benefit from a radon collector installed under a "radon barrier" (a sheet of plastic that covers the crawl space).

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