Radon Questions, Answered Honestly

Both things are true. North Texas sits in a lower-potential zone on the EPA map, and most Dallas homes test fine — we say that freely. But zone maps average whole regions, and elevated homes appear across the metroplex without pattern, next door to homes that test near zero. Low-risk means fewer elevated homes, not none — and the only way to know which kind yours is, is a 48-hour test.

A naturally occurring radioactive gas from uranium breaking down in soil and rock. It drifts up through foundation cracks and openings, and in enclosed homes it can concentrate. It is invisible and odorless, and long-term exposure is the second-leading cause of lung cancer in the U.S. behind smoking — which is the entire reason this trade exists. Outdoors it disperses harmlessly; the question is only ever what is happening inside your house.

Radon is measured in picocuries per liter (pCi/L). The U.S. average indoors is about 1.3; the EPA action level is 4.0, above which mitigation is recommended; between 2.0 and 4.0 the EPA suggests considering it. Our reports give you the 48-hour average, the hourly graph behind it, and a plain-English verdict — no scare formatting, no upsell math.

This is our most common call, and yes — the service is built around contract clocks. A monitor drop is a short visit, the protocol needs 48 closed-house hours, and results go out the morning the monitor comes up. Call with the deadline and we schedule backward from it; if the result is elevated, the mitigation quote comes same-day so negotiation can use a real number.

A sealed suction point under the slab (or membrane in a crawl space), PVC pipe, and a quiet inline fan running the gas up past the roofline — continuous gentle suction on the soil so the gas never enters the house. Routing is where craft shows: through the garage or attic where the house allows, painted exterior runs where it does not. You get a manometer gauge to glance at, a fan that draws like a light bulb, and a written under-4.0 guarantee.

Testing runs $150-$250 ($175-$275 with transaction priority). Mitigation systems install for $1,200-$2,800 on most slab homes, $1,800-$3,500 for crawl space systems, verification test included. New-construction rough-ins are a few hundred dollars during the build. Radon has a reputation as a scary word attached to a surprisingly reasonable fix — the fix costs less than most fence repairs.

Charcoal kits are better than nothing and fine for casual curiosity, but they give one blended number with no hourly data, no tamper evidence and meaningful error bars — and no transaction will accept one. A calibrated continuous monitor gives the hour-by-hour picture that makes the average trustworthy. For a decision as binary as 'mitigate or relax,' the professional test is cheap certainty.

Radon risk is a long-exposure story, not an emergency — nobody needs to move out tonight. An elevated result means schedule the fix, which typically installs in a day and drops the level immediately; the verification test proves it. The families who have a problem are the ones who never tested, not the ones with a scheduled install date.