An element that may be lurking inside any home or building is a dangerous, airborne gas called radon. It’s dangerous because it is a radioactive gas, which means it has the potential to cause cancer. In 1988, the Surgeon General began to issue a warning about radon. Radon may be responsible for thousands of cases of lung cancer every year in people who never smoked. In fact, the lung damage from the radon level in many homes is equal to the damage from smoking 5 packs of cigarettes a day.
You can’t smell radon. You can’t see it. You can’t taste it. It’s completely invisible and undetectable by human senses. The way to tell if you have radon in the home is to have your home’s air tested by a company like RMES, Radon Measurement and Elimination Services, which not only detects radon, but also provides Radon Abatement in Milwaukee WI.
Radon gas originates under the ground, so it’s detected in basements and in crawl spaces, but the air of course permeates the entire house. Also, just becuase a house or building doesn’t have a basement or a crawl space, but instead was built on a slab, does not mean that radon gas is not present. When a person exercises in a home that has radon, the increased rate of respiration as they breathe in the air only increases the risk of getting lung damage from radon. The level of radon inside a home is 200 to 300 percent higher in the winter than in the summer.
There are several ways to reduce the levels of radon in a home or building to meet the EPA’s standards. One method of Radon Abatement in Milwaukee WI is to seal the basement with a polyurethane caulk so that gases in the soil below do not leak into the home. Another method, which is more successful in the greater amount of homes, is soil depressurization, which is also called sub-slab depressurization. A certified contractor would need to install a pipe that begins in floor of the basement and goes all the way up to the rooftop. There is a fan inside the pipe, and the system works like an exhaust fan, to draw dangerous gases out of the basement up through the pipe along the outside of the house.
