Radon--Ugggg!

You won't want to read this post if you become paranoid about things or if you don't have the means to spend over $1,000-- just sayin'. I should note too that it is very possible even for neighbors to have very different levels so hopefully everyone has super low levels in their homes!

Ever since I learned about Radon, about 6 years ago, I have had this nagging feeling that I need to be concerned about it and check the levels in the homes we've lived in. Just recently the topic resurfaced because Rhett's homeopath suggested that the Radon levels could be causing health problems in their family. He bought a level tester and then offered it to anyone that would like to borrow it. We jumped on that quickly. A few days later we were sick. Sick because our levels are around 21. If it is above 4 they say you should get it taken care of. After getting it taken care of, known as mitigation, which is just installing a fan and piping the radon out from under your house your levels are less than 1. When we called the company to come fix it they really didn't believe me that our levels were that high. They figured the tester wasn't calibrated properly. But we tested a few areas and all were in the 20's. And right after us someone tested and got 6, another 0.9(Rhett's after mitigation which was 16 before), and another was 5. We knew it was working and so their, 'Holy Cow you're going to die,' reaction made us feel awful. We read later that at our levels we were getting the equivalent of smoking 2 packs of cigarettes a day. :( Not a good feeling. Every time we see commercials for Tobacco awareness of the people with lung cancer we (half heartedly) joke that we'll be there because of Radon! Well we had our fan installed today and we sleep much better; simply from knowing we're not in a toxic home.