We have RADON in our ICF house!!! Will our ERV mitigate and fix our problem?

welcome back to lake lott build i'm here with my honey so today's episode is going to be about radon we have radon so let's take a look at our little machine because what we got and then we'll walk through uh how it works [Music] so a couple of weeks ago i think i'm gonna insert the footage we checked for radon because half of our house is technically underground and even though missouri's not in a crazy high area of the country for radon we are in an area for radon and we've had neighbors talk to us about they had radon and a couple of houses in our neighborhood have already done remediation so we knew we needed to check we were just hoping that it didn't come back positive so i am filling out a form for a radon test it's just good practice we're in an area with not a super high amount of radon but we are in kind of the orange or yellow area of the country for radon so we left a radon test out in our primary bedroom for three days and now i'm just shipping it off and they're going to tell us if we have any issues oh that's wonderful so it just goes in this little packet yep it goes in this packet they do the testing and then they'll post our results online and we'll know if we have radon if you've watched um some of the previous videos way way back we actually went ahead and installed an underground pipe to mitigate for radon if we have any hopefully we won't have any we won't need to use it but we do have a system already set up to mitigate for radon excellent all right well honey why don't you walk us through what is uh what's going on here what you have so we got their test results back and they came in at seven point something i forget now um the epa recommends that you treat your home for anything for or over but technically there's no safe level of radon radon is the second leading cause of lung cancer in the united states and we're finding now that a lot of the people who haven't smoked or don't have other risk factors when they get lung cancer it's usually because they've lived in a home with radon so we got that result we knew we had to do something about it and instead of buying more charcoal tests to test again to make sure that that was accurate we picked up this device from amazon now this is not sponsored but i will link both the charcoal test that gave us our initial results and i will link this device down below this monitors our instantaneous radon level and then it also gives us a seven day average in a long term average so this will allow you when you're trying to remediate for radon to monitor how you're doing so john take us through what we did to try to get rid of our radon hoping that we wouldn't have to install one of the radon fans okay so leslie bars the little piece of equipment and we turn it on and it is at seven seven which which means that this read exactly the same as our charcoal test that went to the lab which is great okay so the way we set up the test is is that we turned all of the hvac off and we turned the erv so we wanted a baseline is there anything seeping into the house right and so that was our benchmark and our benchmark was seven seven right okay so then what we decided to do is go to the erv and know and come with us here so we went to the erv and i'll show you what we originally set it on so if you can remember from the other episodes i originally set the erv at 100 exhaust and 100 of supply and we put it at 10 minutes for every hour okay so what happened was is that it actually went up a little bit and so we thought okay it's not moving enough air so we put it at 20 minutes and it went up more that's still only getting nervous i'm like okay so what is happening in my opinion is that the circulation of air coming in and going out is not balanced so what i decided to do was i'll show you right here was take the exhaust down one notch and keep the supply up what that does is that it puts a positive pressure in the house meaning it is pushing more air into the house than it is pulling out ever so slightly but just enough so what we were able to do is move our long-term average from seven it's down now to three but if you look at our real time average it's vacillating between 0.62 and 1.18 um and we are slowly but surely moving this number down from five it's already down to three and in my opinion and i think john feels the same i think we're going to be able to remediate the radon in this house just by using the erv and i read a lot online i've read several articles that the erv is a way to move radon out of your home especially since we've been able to change the pressure and keep that you know pull from the ground coming into the house we're able to get fresh air in without creating a vacuum so really important if you have an erv get one of these monitors because you may be creating negative pressure and actually pulling radon into your home without knowing it especially if you're not monitoring for that okay so in the event that your erv and you make your adjustments and you still cannot get the amount let's say the amount of radon that is coming up from the soil is more than your erv can remove there's two things you can do one you can get of course a bigger erv and hope that that bigger erv will over compensate for the amount coming in but if that is the case if you go to a bigger erv you're probably going to need bigger duct work right so that is one of those that's a that's that could be a real problem if you already have all your ductwork and all your drywall is on the other thing is is what we have here is the pipe that goes into the uh into under the slab and that is for specifically a radon removal which is this cut this pipe comes up and there is a electric motor which pulls a vacuum from under the slab pulls it all to there and then you turn it take it outside the house and then you exhaust it outside the house we did this we poured the floor because this was leftover pipe actually from our set our sanitary system and so it was very easy it was truly just a leftover section of pipe it is so much easier to do this when you cast it in the pour versus core drilling and then having to clean up all the core drill and then put your pipe in now if we have to let's say we keep going through all this and it starts to come back and we just can't get around it you just don't know how to fix it we will have to core this and take it out but that is a cord to the outside which means we can cut the metal on the outside you can core from the outside and come in therefore all of the coring junk can be on the outside of the house but that makes sense to you guys so if you are building an icf house and you have some extra pipe put it in your utility room just in case because it's so easy to connect it right now yeah i was i was really surprised actually that we ended up with radon in the house but we planned for it we thought let's let's put in something so that we can remediate it if we need to but so far the erv and the way that john has devised it and changed the pressure so far it's working really really well and i expect our long-term average to be one or less yeah because i mean it's only been a week yeah yeah it started at seven it's already down to three but it went from seven to point four in one day right i mean that's what when i changed when i changed this little guy right here from a hundred percent and a hundred percent when i changed it to a hundred percent and ninety percent it dropped at seven points in 24 hours that is what is so that is what's so amazing that we were but we've hit it we know exactly so thank you all for joining us i hope this has been helpful the links for both our charcoal test and the air things device that we use to monitor radon now are in the description down below again not sponsored but just trying to provide you some helpful links for what we've used we'll see you next time thanks for coming by [Music]

Channel: Lake Lot Build

Views: 15,359

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Id: 35NxSXNOavo

Length: 10min 11sec (611 seconds)

Published: Mon May 16 2022