Your house in Edmonton may be trying to kill you. Mine absolutely was.
Radon is Canada's leading cause of lung cancer in non-smokers. Over 3,000 Canadians die each year from radon-induced lung cancer.
Radon's a gas that is everywhere, but it can accumulate in basements and homes. You won't feel groggy or notice – that is, until you die of lung cancer. The only way to know, is to test for it.
There are a few ways you can test
I did all of them.
Evict Radon
Evict Radon will mail you a 90-day test at cost, to support their radon research. You leave the little detector in your basement for three months, mail it back, and a lab tells you how bad it is.
Mine said this:
404 Bq/m³. Double the guideline. Yikes.
Canadian Tire
You can just go to Canadian Tire and buy a digital radon meter. It's not cheap, but it gives you a live reading on your phone instead of making you wait three months.
Edmonton Public Library
Or, because libraries are literally the best thing in the entire universe, you can just go to EPL and check out a digital radon meter for free.
A word of warning: when I checked, there were 660 people on hold for 164 kits, and they don't lend them out from May through August, because radon readings are less accurate in the summer. Get in line now.
I did them all. And every single one of them said I was going to die.
That's why I called Howard
Howard Fuhr is the owner of Radon Solutions Alberta. Here's how he explains it:
"Radon is a breakdown of uranium in soil that gets into your home through cracks, in foundations, in slabs, penetrations that come out of your floor like your sewer pipes."
So how do you get rid of it? Back to Howard:
"To get rid of it, we need to basically depressurize a home so that gas can have a way to get out. And it's essentially like having a vacuum system underneath your home that takes that gas and exits it out the side of a home."
The install
Howard and the team came over, and did the whole thing in a day. They need to dig out soil under your slab, so for some installs they may need to cut a hole in the basement slab. In my case, they used the existing hole for my sewer drain cleanout.
From there they run a pipe into the sealed suction pit, put a fan on top, and vent the whole thing to the outside.
Did it work?
It did! Look at those numbers!
We went from over 300 becquerels per cubic metre. That's 50% higher than Canada's recommended maximum. To, like… 9.
The drop happened within a couple of days of the fan going on. Over the first two days of October, it averaged 9 Bq/m³, and the highest reading was 13.
Now that's what I call a radon mitigation.
Full disclosure
Radon Solutions Alberta gave me a discount in exchange for making this video. They offered to set me up with a referral code, but instead I asked them to give the discount to you.
If your house is trying to kill you, give Radon Solutions Alberta a call and tell them that Troy sent you to get a bit of a deal. (Test first, though. Your house might be fine. Mine wasn't.)
You can't give me the dopamine rush of you liking my video if you die of lung cancer.
Radon, get out!
