An Extremely Complicated Installation

We got a call from a potential customer about 1.5 hours away from our shop and he said that his radon levels were around 45 pCi/L. These were some of the highest we had heard of and at those levels you have about an 80 times higher chance of getting lung cancer than the risk of drowning. With two young children, this couple was very concerned. When we went out to put the quote together, we found an old farmhouse with multiple additions on it. In total it had 3 crawlspaces, and two separate levels in the basement, with one of the slabs being very large. Because of the amount of different sections there were to treat, we decided that 6 separate suction points were necessary, especially because we were almost certain that the soil would be tight and compacted. This would require two separate systems to be able to draw from these points.

We worked extensively with the homeowner to put together a design that allowed both systems to be out of the way and hidden. One was to be put on the back of the house and the other on the side behind a small tree. Though the trickiest part was the interior section and how to connect all of the suction points together without impairing the usage or aesthetics of the basement. We ended up finding plumbing runs that hid the pipe in the floor joists so that it didn’t take up any headroom. Once we had decided on the system design, now it was time to install.

It ended up taking us almost the whole week, partially due to the size of the project, but mainly the tough structure of the farmhouse. One of the crawlspace walls that we had to drill through was almost 18 inches thick and took hours to drill through. Our other big obstacle was going through the side of the house. We quickly found out that it was also rather thick. There were multiple layers of wood, brick, concrete, balls of foam insulation, and every other material you can imagine. 

Eventually though we completed this crazy project and when we took a step back to admire our work, both the customer and us were very happy. Our design functioned as intended, the system was tucked away and hidden as well as possible. When we got the radon results a couple days later, we were blown away to see that the levels had dropped to around .7 pCi/L, which is just a little above levels that you find outside. Our customer left us a review on Google and Facebook. Leaving us with the amazing feeling that we exceeded our customer’s expectations and installed an extremely effective system.