Jessie Green, former president of the North Star Chaper of American Association of Radon Scientist and Technologists (AARST), and present owner of American Radon Mitigation joins today’s session to discuss radon systems.
Jessie mentions that there is radon in every house, but the levels vary. Tessa highlights that high levels of radon can be present even in houses without basements.
Jessie talks about the difference between a radon system and the American Radon System, installation, and how it works. He highlights why periodic testing should be practiced. He also talks about digital and mobile monitors. They talk about how to mitigate the radon levels in the basement and in different foundation types. Then he shares the cost for installing the mitigation system.
To suggest show topics, e-mail podcast@structuretech.com.
TRANSCRIPTION
The following is a transcription from an audio recording. Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it may be slightly incomplete or contain minor inaccuracies due to inaudible passages or transcription errors.
Bill Oelrich: Welcome everyone, you’re listening to Structure Talk, a Structure Tech presentation. My name is Bill Oelrich, alongside Tessa Murry and Reuben Saltzman, as always your three-legged stool coming to you from the Northland, talking all things houses, home inspections and anything else that’s rattling around in our brain. Well, on today’s episode, we have guest Jesse Green, who is the owner of American Radon, and we’re gonna pick Jesse’s brain about Radon systems today, because Jesse has a different way of doing business. He’s gonna tell you all about it, but first, before we get going with Jesse, Reuben, Tessa, how are you doing today?
Tessa Murry: Hey, good.
Reuben Saltzman: Hey, I’m doing fantastic. I love this warm weather so much, I really do. It’s hot here, every day feels like it’s about 90 degrees and it just feels like this is what summer should be, and I’m loving every minute of it.
BO: Perfect.
RS: How about you?
TM: You can see my face. You know my answer to that question. I don’t know how you enjoy the humidity like this, it’s just… You go outside, and you instantly start sweating, it’s just… It’s not for me.
BO: It’s 14 days a year that are this bad.
TM: Thank goodness.
BO: And you just move on with it.
[laughter]
RS: 14… You said this bad. 14 days that are like this, I would say. And Tessa, you can just be very thankful for a working air conditioner right?
TM: Amen. Yes.
RS: Life’s good.
TM: Yes. And I feel for all those people out there that do not have AC in this heat and humidity.
RS: Yeah, that’d be brutal. That’d be brutal. As much as I like it, I don’t like sleeping in it. I do appreciate having an air conditioned room to sleep in.
TM: Yes.
BO: You two are officially full-bred Minnesotans because that’s the first and the only thing you talk about is the weather. It can get uncomfortable you ask somebody a question about the weather.
RS: It’s very true. It’s very true. Yeah.
BO: Hey, can we talk about Radon and not talk about weather?
TM: Let’s do it.
RS: Alright, fine. Well you said how am I doing. So we got Jesse on the show here today. And Jesse and I met through a business coaching group many years ago, and it was love at first sight, at least for me to him, I don’t know how he felt, I can’t… I can’t speak for Jesse. But he has a totally different approach to doing Radon systems, and I’m gonna screw it up. I call it a radon mitigation system, but I know that’s not the current term today. What are we supposed to call it, Jesse? Is it a radon reduction system?
Jesse Green: We call it radon mitigation system.
RS: Oh, good, okay, alright. I’m safe.
JG: Yeah.
RS: Alright, excellent.
[laughter]
TM: We’re not as outdated as we thought. We’re still hip, I guess.
BO: No, no. Maybe we’re all outdated, I don’t know.
RS: Alright, good. We’re still cool.
[laughter]
TM: We might be.
BO: Well, Jesse, why don’t you go ahead and just introduce yourself personally and talk a little bit about your company and how long you’ve been doing this work.
JG: Okay, yeah. So my name is Jesse Green. My dad and I started this company, American Radon Mitigation here in the Twin Cities back in 2014. We worked a lot for the seller, most of the Radon mitigators out there, some of the sellers putting it in as part of the home sale, they’re kind of forced to put it in and they of course wanna do it as cheaply as possible, and, “Hey, just get me below four picocuries so I can sell my house.” That was fine. We did it for a year, we didn’t really make any money, so my dad decided to leave the company at that time, and I wasn’t quite ready to give up on it, so we stuck with it. And then once I started doing the business coaching, I was able to kind of differentiate ourselves, and we kinda got away from doing the stuff for the seller that wanted just to kinda get… Barely get by and kinda found our niche of working for the home buyer or the home owner that’s kind of in it for the long haul and wants to get their radon levels as low as possible, wants it to be energy efficient, aesthetically pleasing. So, yeah, that’s kind of where we’re at now.
RS: And Jesse, you’ve been involved in more than just simply the business and doing radon mitigation, you’ve also been a very active participant in a local association for radon professionals. Aren’t you the president of that group?
JG: I was, I recently resigned just because there’s just too many things to… Too many plates to keep in the air or balance.
RS: Jesse, can you talk about the name of that group and how long you did it for and what your purpose was?
JG: So it was the North Star Chapter of AARST, and I was involved with it… I don’t know when it started, 2015 or ’16, ’17, I would guess. So I was just a board member for a couple of years and was the president for the last two or three years.
BO: Yeah, Jesse, can you explain what AARST is? Spell ’em out.
JG: AARST, is the American Association of Radon Scientists and Technologists.
BO: It’s a mouthful. I like it.
JG: Yeah. It sure is.
[laughter]
RS: AARST it is. Yeah.
BO: Hey Jesse, what did you do before you got into the radon mitigation business?
JG: So I’ve done a lot of different things. First, I owned a lawn service with my cousin that we started in high school, I got really bored with that. Towards the end of that, I started a party bus company, which was a terrible idea, unless you like baby sitting 40 drunk people and cleaning up after them. I did trucking for a few years, worked for my cousins that own a excavating company, which was a great background for radon mitigation because you got to see the foundation and everything go in, you kinda learn where settling and stuff is, which we can take to our advantage during radon mitigation. And then we got into radon in 2014, like I said, but even before that with my dad as a kid growing up, when my mom went to the beach with my siblings, I was like, “Nope, I’m going to work with my dad.” He’s done concrete pretty much most of his life, so I was around construction as a… I guess I was about three years old when I started going to work with him. So that’s been super helpful.
BO: Yeah, and even just watching contractors interact with clients and what those conversations look like, and some of the nervous energy that comes out when people are building and you’re not sure what the end is gonna be or how much it’s gonna cost.
JG: Yeah. And the most beneficial thing is… With radon mitigation, most of what we’re dealing with is below the house, you can’t see it. I don’t have x-ray vision, unfortunately, I can’t see through the slab or see what that settling is, so we can take those pathways and use them to our advantage. But being around my dad when I was a kid, we’d know how the footings are laid out. “Hey, there’s a center footing here. We’re not gonna get communication on the other side of it. Hey, there’s a walk out here, so this is all disturbed soil, so there’s likely gonna be settling over here.” So all those things have just been really helpful, and I’m really grateful for kinda that background or people teaching me how to do those things.
BO: Awesome. Well, let’s kinda begin this conversation with just the technical explanation of radon. I think most people get that it’s this naturally occurring thing. But Reuben, you’re like, Mr. Specificity and technical detail. What exactly is radon?
RS: Okay, Bill, we won’t get super technical. Radon is a gas that comes up from the ground, it comes from the decay of uranium-238. And they say that this is the second leading cause of lung cancer in the US. And we have a lot of it in Minnesota homes. I think a lot of it has to do with our soil content, a lot of it has to do with the fact that we’ve got basements, we got a big portion of the house that’s below the ground. We have much more contact with the ground because of that. And if you have high levels of radon, there’s ways to fix it, that’s my short and sweet version of it. And that’s why we test for it, and that’s why there’s mitigation contractors like Jesse. Now, Jesse, why don’t you fill in the gaps and correct everything that I just said wrong?
[chuckle]
JG: I think you nailed it, Reuben. So yeah, radon mitigation is…
RS: Oh, wow. Alright.
JG: Yeah, good job.
RS: Okay, alright, sweet.
TM: Hey, can I add one thing though?
BO: Okay, so what…
TM: We can find high radon in houses that don’t have basements though. Is that right, Jesse?
JG: Yeah.
TM: You do mitigation systems in a lot of slab-on grade houses as well, or town homes?
JG: Yeah, not a lot of them, but yeah, every house has radon, it’s just a matter of what the levels are.
BO: Tell us again, what’s safe and… Or what’s actionable? And how is it measured? And does that ever change?
JG: Yeah, so a lot of people get hung up on the 4 picocuries, that is not a safe level of radon. There is no safe level of radon, it’s a Class A carcinogen. It’s like saying, “Hey, one cigarette a day is safe, but two is dangerous.” The reason that that exists is because that’s what the EPA set as a guideline. They said, “Hey, you should consider mitigation if you’re between 2 and 4 picocuries.” And they strongly recommend mitigating anything above 4 picocuries. And I’m told the reason that they selected those numbers is back in the day, in the ’80s and ’90s, when they started doing radon mitigation, that’s what contractors could consistently get the radon levels down to, is below four, so they didn’t wanna set the action level, you know? If we could only get it down to three, they didn’t wanna say like, “Hey, you should mitigate anything above two and a half.” So that’s where that comes from, and a lot of people, especially in the real estate world think like, “Hey, it was 3.5, you’re safe.”
JG: Well, not necessarily. You know, if you’re doubling or… A lot of things you hear are, you can take your radon level and double it, and it’s equivalent to smoking about that many cigarettes a day. So if you had a 3.5, your family is smoking about seven cigarettes a day. I wouldn’t consider that safe for my family.
RS: Wow.
TM: I’d never heard that before. Yeah, that’s interesting.
BO: How long have contractors like you been mitigating radon?
JG: So radon mitigation started in the ’80s.
BO: Interesting. Jesse, I don’t recall ever seeing a radon mitigation system on the side of a house, like pre-2000s, frankly mid-2000s. Now, I see them all over the place, but if people were doing this in the early ’80s, this must have been a fairly small business.
JG: Yeah, I think it was pretty slow to take off. We didn’t get in it until 2014, so we’re relatively new. But yeah, before, my uncle approached this about getting into it in in 2014. I had never heard of it. So I think it’s just really, really slow to take off. There’s still not a lot of awareness around it.
BO: Yeah, I think there’s more awareness just because it’s part of the real estate disclosure documents that are handed out at the time of a listing. But I just wanna talk a little more about radon itself. So, you test, this level comes back at whatever it is, and there’s action that needs to be taken. And say, you install a system, are you good to go forever then, or is there a chance that the fluctuation… These levels might fluctuate inside your home, even after a system’s been installed?
JG: No, so you should test at least every two years, if you have a radon mitigation installed. And I really like that you can do an Alpha Track radon test kit where you’re continuously testing, basically. It’s a three to 12-month test. Or like the digital radon monitors where you can actively monitor it in realtime. So a lot of our customers choose to have that and they can see if there’s a problem, if that fan dies, it’s not just an alarm or the manometer you’re looking at. You’re gonna see that on your phone, if you have a certain monitor, you can see your radon levels rise.
RS: Which one do you recommend?
JG: I really like the Ecosense, EcoQube or EcoQube by Ecosense. It’s a digital radon monitor. They’ve got an app that is awesome. You can share it with people, so my customers can share it with me so I can monitor their radon levels remotely. We just had one a few weeks ago, and it’s like, “Man, your radon levels should be lower. We might wanna come back and revisit. I think your garage or front step might be contributing to your radon levels.” Typically we see them around 0.4 or 0.5 and her’s were like 0.9. So we’d like to try to get that a little bit lower if we can.
RS: Now, Jesse, let me ask you about this, ’cause you touched on this, you said that kinda the action level the EPA has established is 4.0, and it’s because way back in the day, they realized that this is what contractors could reliably get the number down to. But do you think that that’s still a good number? And I mean, you’re getting fussy about somebody having a 0.9 and saying they should be like 0.4 or 0.5. What can you reliably get numbers down to, and what should contractors be reliably getting numbers down to?
JG: So, I’m a fan of trying to aim for outdoor levels. We guarantee 1.5 or less in most cases. I want them to be below one or as close to outdoor levels as we can. And on average, over the last two or three years, our post mitigation tests come back at 0.5.
TM: What are some of the conditions that make it really difficult to get a house below 1.5?
JG: Usually it’s the ones where the customers don’t want to invest the money that is required to treat the whole house. So say a crawl space, for example, I had a customer a few years ago that had two crawl spaces, so two additions and then the basement. She only had the budget to treat just the basement and not the crawl spaces. And I don’t remember what her starting radon level was, but I think with just treating the basement had dropped it to like 2.5. In that instance it’s like, “Oh, we can do better than this.” But she didn’t have the budget at the time to try to get it lower by addressing those crawl spaces. And that’s something we can always come back to. We engineer the system so that we could add on to it and have the capacity to do so in the future.
TM: I was thinking you’d say something like having to do with soil conditions or locations of footings, that that would prevent you from being able to drop that radon level low, but it sounds like you figured out ways to install systems where you can still get it low, it’s just a monetary issue.
JG: Primarily, yeah. Because yeah, you can stitch in a finished basement or the center footings, you can get on the other side of that. So there’s ways to do it. Some of those ways are really expensive, crawl space is just one example of one of those challenges we run into. Aftermarket drain tile is one of my nightmares. I hate aftermarket drain tile when that floor to wall joint is left open and it’s a finished basement and you can’t get out to seal it or address it. And it is… They are just so expensive to operate because you’re losing so much conditioned air. And I don’t know what the unintended consequence of that is.
RS: Okay, so for anybody who doesn’t completely understand what you’re saying, let me explain it. In a new home, they put in drain tile and it’s this corrugated perforated stuff that’s gonna go around the perimeter of the foundation, and the current code requires that the intersection between the basement floor and the foundation wall be sealed, and it’s to make sure that you don’t have radon gas leaking up into the house. But on older retrofit drain tile systems where someone’s got a leaky basement, they hire a wet basement specialist to come in and water proof their basement, a lot of the time, they break up the concrete about a foot in all around the perimeter of the home, they dig a trench, they put drain tile in, and they put some concrete back in there, but they would leave a gap between the basement floor and the foundation wall. And the idea there is that if you have water running down the wall, it’s gonna drain down underneath the slab, it’s not gonna just sit on the basement floor. But Jesse’s problem with these systems is that nothing’s airtight and like Jesse… If it was unfinished, it’d be no big deal, Jesse could just go in there and seal all those openings. You use like a million tubes of cork, right?
JG: Yeah.
RS: But if it’s finished, then it’s all concealed, Jesse has no access to it, and then you install your radon mitigation system. And the way the mitigation system works is it’s sucking air out from underneath the basement slab, it’s creating negative pressure there, and if nothing is sealed, it’s like you’re sucking on… It’s like… I can’t think of a good analogy.
BO: It’s you’re sucking on a broken straw.
RS: There. Thank you, Bill. That’s perfect. You’re trying to suck water out of a drink and you got a big hole in the side of your straw, that’s what you’re trying to do. Perfect, Bill, thank you. And so to compensate for that, Jesse, you’re saying you gotta put in like a super duper fan that sucks way more air than you normally would, and along with sucking out air from underneath the slab, you’re sucking a bunch of household conditioned air underneath the slab, and it’s a big energy loss. Is that… That’s what you’re getting at, right?
JG: Yep, exactly.
BO: One of my questions I had coming into this, is there anything environmentally that would affect radon levels in your house? And you seem to indicate that maybe a front step or a garage or something like that might have some effect on your radon levels. What do you mean by that and why would it affect the radon?
JG: Just because there’s an adjacent slab, and it can in some instances contribute radon to the house. Not all the time, it’s pretty rare, very rarely do we mitigate a garage. We just had a radon training course here six months ago or so, and for the first time ever, during that course, we had to mitigate a front step to get at that extra little bit to drop the radon levels a little bit more. So yeah, there’s odd ball stuff all the time that you run into, and it can be something like that front step or garage that’s contributing to the radon.
BO: This front step or that garage is outside the building envelope, so how is that adding to the radon levels inside your house?
JG: It depends. There can be a connection or a pathway. So this one that was the 0.9 that I talked about earlier, and I wanna get it a little bit lower, they have the garage floor… Between the garage floor and the poured foundation wall, where that floor to wall joint would be, they have some metal flashing or galvanized metal or something that’s rolled up from below the garage slab up to the sill plate and its sandwiched between the top of the foundation and sill plate, and I’m thinking that’s the pathway that that radon is being drawn into the house so the house is putting negative pressure on that garage slab and maybe pulling radon up through there. I’ve only seen that a handful of times, I don’t know why you would put that there, unless there’s insulation there that’s for a fire block or something there. That front step that we were talking about earlier, that was up high, so it was sitting on top of the block foundation and the radon was coming through the rim joist.
BO: We’ve talked a little bit about different foundation types; you have block walls, you have poured concrete walls, you have crawl spaces that may or may not have a cement floor, you have slabs-on-grade. If you’re going out and you see a house that has many different foundation types, say it’s a split level and maybe there’s a crawl space and two levels of basement, do you have to mitigate each level if you’re truly gonna do the best job, or can you start at the lowest and then work your way out to the next highest in an attempt to get it below that number?
JG: Yeah. So, no, you don’t always have to capture the whole footprint of the house. Typically, we like to do our estimates in phases of, “Hey, here’s best case scenario,” where to install a suction point in the basement and then kinda go from there. So I like to combine the pressure field extension testing where we’re measuring the pressure below the slab with reference to the basement, so that’s one useful tool. And then EcoTrackers which is the new radon monitor for radon professionals, and we scatter those throughout the house. And a lot of our installs take more than one day to do, so on day one, we’re trying to get part of the system in and hooked up and activated, and then we let those monitors run while we’re on the job and we can come back in the morning and see like, “Hey, this dropped the radon levels below one. We can pack up.” Or, “Hey, it’s still 2 picocuries or it’s really high over above that crawl space. It looks like we’re gonna have to keep going here.” So we can combine the pressure field extension with monitoring the radon levels and we kind of use those two things to make our data-driven decisions that way.
BO: Okay. I’m gonna allow you to do a sales pitch, but let me frame this question first. So tell me, what’s the difference between a radon system and an American Radon System? Why is Jesse’s system going to be better and more reliable than any old pipe stuck into the concrete?
JG: We kind of refer to the old way of doing things as the poke and hope method of, “Hey, we’re gonna poke a hole in the slab here, we’re gonna install the pipe and put on this fan, and we’re gonna hope it gets your radon levels below four.” I don’t like doing that. I feel like we owe it to our customers to do better than that. So by spending a little bit more time, yes, that costs more money, we can typically get their radon levels a lot lower than that, which is gonna be safer for their family. So I kinda like to picture every house that we go out to to give an estimate on as, “Hey, my sister Kelsey is gonna live in this house and my niece and my two nephews are gonna live in the basement or play in the basement. How would I do it if that was the case?” I don’t have any kids, but I got a heart for kids. So is it…
JG: My goal isn’t gonna be, “Hey, Kelsey. We got you to 3.5. You’re “safe”. Your kids are smoking seven cigarettes a day.” Of course, that’s not gonna be our goal. We wanna get it as low as possible. And then on top of that, we want it to be energy efficient. I don’t want it to cost $300 a year to operate or cause backdrafting issues. And then I want it to be aesthetically pleasing. So I am never gonna install it on the outside of the house unless it’s your only option. So I kind of try to present our customers with those options like, “Hey, if this was my house, this is what I would do,” and obviously if their budget doesn’t allow that, we can adjust it and maybe it’s we’re not trying to treat the whole house or maybe they’re okay with an outside system or something along those lines.
BO: Sure. And then one follow-up, are you carrying multiple fans on your trucks and you’re like, “I need a 100 or a 200 or a 300-size fan”? I’m just pulling numbers.
JG: Yeah.
BO: I have no idea what your fans are called, but…
JG: Yeah. So I do carry more than I need to just because if we’re doing fan replacements on systems that we didn’t install, I like to try to replace it with the same or equivalent. But I’ve probably got, I’d say, maybe eight different fans that I roll around with in my van, and then we have some really odd ball ones that we keep in stock too, but I don’t carry them around with me.
TM: So I’ve got a question for you, Jesse. So your systems, it sounds like, you figure out a way to bring that radon level down below one and a half, ideally. How do you do that? What’s the difference between just poking a hole and putting in a fan like these other contractors are doing? Are you drilling multiple holes in the slab to try and find the exact location to put the pipe through and are you doing calculations to figure out which fans would be best based on soil conditions? How do you actually calculate how to remove this radon differently than these other companies?
JG: That’s a good question. Diagnostic testing or pressure field extension testing where measuring the suction below the slab that the radon system is creating, that’s really the key to it. Let’s envision your mechanical room, which is kind of our domain typically, is in one corner of the house.
TM: Okay.
JG: And then in the opposite corner, your daughter’s bedroom is over there. We obviously wanna make sure our radon system is able to reach your daughter’s bedroom. So we’re gonna pull up a corner of the carpet, drill a half-inch test hole through the concrete, and then we hook up a digital pressure gauge so that we can see, “Hey, here’s what our baseline numbers are.” And then when I apply suction to my suction point or potential suction point area, location in that mechanical room, are we reaching your daughter’s bedroom? And if we’re not, then we can take steps to make sure that we are able to capture that whether it’s moving that suction point to a different location or stitching or adding another suction point. That will also tell us that… That test hole in your daughter’s bedroom will tell us we’re able to measure the air flow that we need to get the desired pressure field extension in your daughter’s bedroom in that test hole. We might know, okay, it takes 20 CFM to get 3 pascals of negative pressure in your daughter’s bedroom under the slab there. Then, that will also tell us we’re able to measure the static pressure, which will tell us what fan. Say we need to apply 1 inch of suction to move 20 CFM to get 3 pascals of negative pressure in your daughter’s bedroom, that will help us determine what fan we need to use, what size pipe and a whole number of other things.
TM: Wow, it’s a lot more technical than we realize, isn’t it?
JG: Yeah, I can kind of nerd on at it till… [chuckle] And I’m not super articulate. So I probably could have said that in a more concise way, but… Yeah, there’s kind of… Just to simplify it, there’s three things that we need to measure. Otherwise, you’re kind of poking and hoping.
TM: Right. Well, that makes a lot of sense that you’re drilling these multiple holes, and doing these tests and gathering this data to see what kind of fan is gonna work and if you need multiple suction points and all that. And so, are there companies out there that don’t do that type of testing that you’re talking about? They just put in a fan and put a pipe through the slab and just come back and just test it quickly to see if it’s below four and if it is, then they’re done?
JG: Yeah. There’s a lot of companies that do that.
BO: Jesse, you mentioned a word a couple of times here, stitching. What do you mean when you say stitching?
JG: So stitching, think of we’re drilling a 5-inch hole every 2-3 feet through the slabs or a corner 5-inch hole, and then we can augur between those holes and we can extend our pressure field extension or our suction into, like a finished area. So, say, we pull the carpet up, we stitch over towards Tessa’s daughter’s bedroom because we’re not reaching there and it’s a finished basement, now that fan is able to go… It’s basically where you put a suction point near Tessa’s bedroom, but obviously Tessa doesn’t want us to run a PVC pipe across her finished basement. So that’s an easy… It’s not necessarily easy. It’s a lot of labor, but it’s a good finished product in the end, because now Tessa doesn’t have to put a soft board in and drywall and paint and tape and all that stuff. At the end, you’re left with a tunnel under the slab, and then we put concrete plugs back in so that the carpet can be put back and you would never know what’s there. So it’s primarily only used in finished basements.
BO: Interesting. Okay, and then what about if you run into foundations, like center foundation-bearing walls, where they’re sitting on a footing? Do you have to stitch under that type of construction or can you go around it or over it?
JG: Yep, yep, if it’s clay, we’re typically not gonna get much suction to reach on the other side of that, so it might look like running a pipe through a closet on the other side and getting in on the other side of that footing. It could be simply stitching under that center footing. If there’s not a closet, you don’t want a pipe coming through the wall on the corner of a room or something. Which is how I used to do it, it’s like, “Oh, my gosh! What were you thinking? We could have done it this way.” But you get better as you go.
TM: I’ve got a question for you, Jesse, that I’m sure a lot of people are wondering. I know that the answer is going to be very variable, but what’s your average cost for a radon mitigation system?
JG: So our average cost over the last year is about $6500, with the PVC prices and stuff just getting higher and higher. And we’re having to pay our employees more and more, that number is going up all the time.
TM: Okay, and there’s licensing requirements that have come into play in the last couple of years here in Minnesota, too. So I’m sure that impacts everything as well.
JG: Yep, yeah. So that adds $75 to every system.
RS: Jesse does not claim to be the cheapest one. In fact, I don’t know. Does anybody charge anywhere near in the same ballpark as what you’re charging for radon, Jesse?
JG: I have never heard of them. No.
[laughter]
RS: Okay, alright. And the point being Jesse offers a unique system. If you’re just looking to slap something in and be done with it and say, “There. I put in a mitigation system,” Jesse’s not the guy to call. He’s the guy to call if you want it super detailed, you want the diagnostic testing done throughout the entire process, sticking tubes below the slab, taking all these readings and Jesse getting funny about levels being at 0.9 and he’s like, “This is not acceptable.” I mean, if you want somebody who is a stickler for this, that’s what Jesse does.
BO: Okay, let’s do this. There are some consequences to radon mitigation you’ve already talked about, you can suck conditioned air out of your house if it’s not done right or if it’s not quite sealed up properly, but are there any good benefits, like unintended benefits to installing radon systems?
JG: I think one would be the moisture levels in the basement. We had a house several years ago, it kinda had that musty kinda old-man-ish smell when we went there to install the system. We installed it, came back three days later to pick up the post-mitigation test and I didn’t notice it until the customer said something, but they were like, “Oh, my gosh! That smell was gone right away.” And I was like, “Oh, yeah. It doesn’t smell like that anymore.” So I think it helps kinda dry out below the slab, which might mean less moisture or humidity in the basement. Maybe your dehumidifier doesn’t have to run as often, which is probably gonna save some money on that, that side of things.
BO: Well, why don’t we do this? Why don’t you go ahead, Jesse, tell everybody where they can get a hold of you if they want, get a consultation. And you can go out and show your business to them.
JG: Yeah. So our website’s americanradonmitigation.com. Got a bunch of videos of me nerding out on YouTube that you can find if you just Google americanradonmitigation.com or YouTube, and yeah, they can find us there.
BO: Alright, well, I think we’re gonna put a wrap on this week’s episode. So Jesse, thank you very much for joining. We appreciate. These two nerd out on stuff all the time. I try to keep them in line, but you’re in good company, if you really want a certain… Or a nerd on technical stuff. I’m probably not capable of understanding all of it, but Reuben and Tess are certainly are. So thank you for your time today. And thank you everybody for listening. We really appreciate it. You’ve been listening to Structure Talk, a Structure Tech presentation. My name is Bill Oelrich alongside Tessa Murry and Reuben Saltzman. Thanks for listening. We’ll catch you next time.
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BO: Hi, everybody. Bill here again with Structure Talk. We really wanna thank you for listening to this podcast. It’s been a ton of fun for us to put this presentation together. And if you could, we would love it if you would go to any of the podcast platforms where you find Structure Talk and leave us a rating and subscribe to the show. You can also subscribe to our blog at structuretech.com. And of course, you can listen to the show on the internet at structuretalk.com. Thanks again for listening. We appreciate the support. And if you have any suggestions for show topics, please email them to podcast@structuretech.com. Thanks for listening.