Feet of a baby girl wearing green socks. Text reads "Living Healthy and Green Starts from the ground up. Test your home for Radon. www.epa.gov/radon"Is a colorless, odorless, deadly gas seeping into your home? Unless you test your home for radon, you’ll never know. It’s estimated that one in 15 homes has elevated levels of radon. Mine did. The amount of radon in the air is measured in Picocuries per Liter, which is abbreviated pCi/L. When I tested our home, the radon levels were around 20 pCi/L, which is much higher than the EPA recommended maximum of 4 pCi/L.

Radon in your home is a serious matter. Radon is the number one cause of lung cancer among non-smokers, and overall it is the second leading cause of lung cancer. It’s responsible for about 21,000 lung cancer deaths each year.

The good news is that radon can be reduced to safe levels, and there are professionals out there to handle the job for you. We hired a certified radon mitigation contractor to come into our home and install a mitigation system. It was really nothing more than sealing cracks in the basement and installing some PVC pipes and a fan system to pull the gas out from under the foundation and route it safely out of the house.

Test kits are available at hardware and home improvement stores. I think my initial test kit cost about $10 and the test is easy to perform. Some state programs offer low-cost or free kits, contact your state radon contact for more information.

January is national radon action month. The radon level in my house is .7pCi/L. What’s yours?

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