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Back in February of 1989, when I was in 7th grade, I wrote a report for science class on the dangers of Radon. Ever since then it’s been kicking around in the back of my head, and with the recent birth of our son Connor (and impending birth of baby girl Judd) it’s something I wanted to make sure wasn’t a potential danger.
After figuring out the costs for the throwaway charcoal tests we purchases an electric one called (pretty much the only one on the market). To make sure we have a long term reading it’s been turned on and running for a few months now. At first the readings were 4.0ish around the stairs, but when moved towards the sump pit the readings increased. Location aside, the seasonal change between winter and summer also seemed to have an effect. As of this morning the reading on the unit was 7.4 picocuries, and had been hovering around 6.9 pCi/L for at least a week.
Considering that the mitigation systems have dropped down to affordable levels for installation, and regulation has been established, there really wasn’t any reason for me not to address this now. In fact, I honestly consider this a home improvement…much like a new roof, or fresh paint, this is a fundamental upgrade to the house and if we should ever move, a selling point.
I checked the Illinois IEMA website for a list of registered mitigation professionals, hit the yellow pages, and settled on Radovent after sending off a request for a quote. Travis from Radovent called me back, let me chew his ear off for a while, and today Ryan/Radovent came out to install the system (Travis also stopped by just to say hi).
Now our basement is not finished, and we spent the holiday weekend cleaning it in preparation for this….so in our opinion this was a pretty straight forward job. At least that’s how I explained it to Travis over the phone, and they seemed to agree when they got onsite. So here is a picture of the sump pump area (where I had thought the mitigation system would go) before any work was done on it (except vacuuming up spider webs):

So the goal basically is to seal any cracks/hole in the floor, drill a 3″ hole in the ground, and have a fan create a negative pressure (suction) underneath your house and expel the radon gas outside (away from any windows or air intake sources) to dispel naturally. It’s pretty straight forward as you can see by the pictures they adjusted the piping a bit (got rid of the black ribbed flex tube) and then hermetically sealed the sump pit (the caulk will dry clear) with a clear lexan square.

Now that the basement is squared away, lets take a look outside where the fan unit and ducting is located. There’s really not a lot to it, there is a service switch for shutting off power to the fan and that’s about it. They did spray paint the couplings because they were black and the fan unit because they tend to yellow in the sun. They also offered to paint it to match my siding…but honestly I think white looked just fine in this application.

The setup looks pretty straight forward but took about five hours for Ryan to install, which is probably about three times as fast as it would have taken me to do. I also kind of messed him up by asking him to shift to outside work while our son Connor was napping…I felt bad asking that, but Ryan was really nice about it. Honestly, I really wanted to do this myself, but I had to sit down and have an honest talk with myself about my ability to pull it off. By the time I bought all the additional tools necessary and factored in my time any savings I’d see would be lost. Plus really it’s the little things that I wouldn’t have learned that would have cost me. I probably would have tried to use plexiglass instead of lexan, which would have resulted in lower weight bearing abilities. That’s a big deal with little kids and sump pits. I also might not have thought about putting silicone caulk between the joints in the outside piping to reduce vibration transfer.
In the end we walked out for under a grand on this, and it was a good situation to let the experts handle. Radon takes about 4 days to dissipate fully so after that we’ll test and see how the levels are now that the system is in place

Well that kinda sucked…
Email stopped working friday, and about 6 hours later so did the web site. At first I thought it was the server, but a little “dig”ging led me to the DNS host as the problem.
I don’t know what happened yet, but it seems like xname.org went down and stopped responding to DNS requests for a few days. It’s a free service so it’s hard to complain, but this is about the third time in a year.
So based on some recommendations, I’ve swung over to zoneedit.com, and kept xname.org as a backup. Hoping for a little more stability, as I already have enough problems to deal with than sporatic email. And why the hell does this crap always happen when I’m waiting on a really important email. >:0

So two bits of news….first I got an A in my English class. Which now wraps up all my English needs to transfer. That’s good news, but not as important as this bit…
Jen’s doctor did another ultrasound and confirmed the gender….we’re going to have a girl! How scary is that????
Connor is going to have a little sister to watch over, Jen’s going to have a little girl to start buying dresses with, and I’m going to need to start practicing my shotgun cleaning skills for when she’s old enough to date

I beat Halo 3 on normal mode a while ago, and ever since I started playing it again on Heroic I have to say I’ve really begun to like it more. At first I needed to play on normal, but the added challenge has really made the game more addicting…..of course we’ll see how I feel if I get around to trying Legendary.
Of course there’s not to much time for gaming…I just finished my Eng 102 class (haven’t gotten my grade yet…hoping for a good one) and pretty soon here my summer math class will start up. I picked up a TI 84 silver calculator that’s bigger than an original gamebody almost.

Also last night we had some freak wind storms, and poof….down went more of our fence. Still waiting to hear back from the insurance company on that….of course it couldn’t have happened last year when we had already fulfilled our deductable.

Back when we bought the house, the very first thing that we did was rip out all of the carpeting. This of course included the stairs, which were covered in blue plush from head to toe:

Flash forward four years, and today we finally got them taken care of. Originally we had planned on putting pergo on them (and we still wish we could have) but alas pergo and bull nosing do not mix. So our next plan was to sand and stain them to match the pergo, but the quality (or lack thereof) of the stairs made that impossible. So we agreed the only choice was to re carpet them.
We wanted to change things up a little bit, so I decided to fill in the numerous marks and paint the risers and sides while I was doing the foyer:

It’s been about fourteen months since that project, and with a one year old the wife had enough. She called Empire and the guy came out yesterday, took some measurements, made a few calls, and came back with an estimate of $250. Some paperwork and an oddly named berber carpet called “butter brickle” here we are:
Before:

After:

Going to take a while to get used to it…..

Excuse me, I believe you have something of mine
There’s more in his photo album.