Full Transcript for Houses from Heck

00:02:09.813 --> 00:02:10.413 Welcome guys. 00:02:10.413 --> 00:02:11.704 Appreciate you being here today. 00:02:11.704 --> 00:02:17.943 Our first question is, what's your go-to snack or drink on a long field day? 00:02:17.943 --> 00:02:19.294 That's an important question. 00:02:19.593 --> 00:02:20.704 Super important. 00:02:20.704 --> 00:02:23.104 You gotta fuel the mind and body. 00:02:23.104 --> 00:02:31.993 I'm a peanut butter and honey sandwich guy because on a hot summer day when that honey starts to crystallize in there, it's so good. 00:02:31.993 --> 00:02:34.163 Yeah, just that and water, that's my go-to. 00:02:34.213 --> 00:02:41.829 I don't necessarily have to eat or snack, I'll just work through, but if I don't have my diet Mountain Dew at the ready I don't know. 00:02:41.829 --> 00:02:44.019 The brain starts to shut down or go backwards. 00:02:44.169 --> 00:02:44.903 I think you're addicted. 00:02:45.204 --> 00:02:45.864 That's key. 00:02:45.864 --> 00:02:48.813 You do often see Josh Kerber with a Diet Mountain Dew. 00:02:48.813 --> 00:02:52.114 90% of the population is addicted to coffee. 00:02:52.114 --> 00:02:53.924 Josh is addicted to Diet Mountain Dew. 00:02:53.924 --> 00:02:54.294 Yes. 00:02:54.354 --> 00:02:55.403 It's cheaper than coffee. 00:02:55.704 --> 00:02:56.003 Yeah. 00:02:56.003 --> 00:02:56.454 Yeah. 00:02:56.753 --> 00:02:57.883 Okay, next question. 00:02:57.883 --> 00:03:01.933 If you are mitigation Rig had a theme song, what would it be? 00:03:02.183 --> 00:03:02.993 Don't stop believing. 00:03:03.008 --> 00:03:03.834 Don't, don't Stop Believing. 00:03:04.183 --> 00:03:05.098 Oh, that's good. 00:03:05.299 --> 00:03:07.088 Why Chad, why did you say that? 00:03:07.389 --> 00:03:18.709 There was this really great Uber ride at the symposium one year and the two of us and Bruce and a few other people were crammed into this Uber. 00:03:18.709 --> 00:03:21.288 And the guy's like, what do y'all want to hear? 00:03:21.288 --> 00:03:22.998 And everybody's just kind of sitting there. 00:03:22.998 --> 00:03:28.618 Bruce says Journey, it was one of the greatest car rides ever. 00:03:28.618 --> 00:03:32.408 Because these just blasting, don't stop believing in the car. 00:03:32.408 --> 00:03:37.109 It's kind of been this group of us, it's been our theme song ever since then. 00:03:37.109 --> 00:03:49.169 We've worked really hard over the last few years to, in the hopes that the radon industry would take a step forward in their technical capacity and professionalism. 00:03:49.169 --> 00:03:52.419 We've tried to encourage that in the industry. 00:03:52.419 --> 00:04:03.818 To me, that's what that song means is for us in that instance is we're not gonna stop believing that we can push that professionalism and technical expertise forward. 00:04:04.118 --> 00:04:05.558 That people may not follow too. 00:04:05.558 --> 00:04:07.449 Like the hope is that they're gonna be there to follow. 00:04:07.449 --> 00:04:12.968 But ultimately to me, to add onto that, it's don't stop believing the numbers you get. 00:04:12.968 --> 00:04:18.908 If you start to understand the building science and why you're taking measurements and getting these numbers. 00:04:18.908 --> 00:04:24.009 Believe the numbers and understand them and it will set you free from a mitigation standpoint. 00:04:24.309 --> 00:04:25.358 Yeah, that's great. 00:04:25.358 --> 00:04:29.108 What is the weirdest thing you've ever found in a crawl space or attic? 00:04:29.259 --> 00:04:30.939 We're in crawl spaces all the time. 00:04:30.939 --> 00:04:36.488 Probably 50% of the houses we work on have crawl spaces, so there's weird stuff in them all the time. 00:04:36.488 --> 00:04:39.738 Dead cats that are just skeletons now. 00:04:39.738 --> 00:04:42.038 Glass, always is glass in there. 00:04:42.038 --> 00:04:55.119 But there was this one house that had an addition that was a crawlspace and we pulled out a contractor trash bag full of beer cans and vodka bottles. 00:04:55.119 --> 00:04:59.139 And I suspect that's what just went in there as they were building that thing. 00:04:59.139 --> 00:05:04.149 Somehow it was still standing and I mean, it was built like 30 or 40 years ago too. 00:05:04.149 --> 00:05:12.499 I was impressed that, they were able to put away that much alcohol and still build a thing that still is standing to this day. 00:05:12.699 --> 00:05:13.329 Amazing. 00:05:13.629 --> 00:05:20.319 In my line of work though, I'm not in the field every day like, like Chad may be, so I get called out to the weird houses. 00:05:20.319 --> 00:05:22.538 I'm not in a whole lot of crawl spaces. 00:05:22.538 --> 00:05:23.699 I delegate that. 00:05:23.699 --> 00:05:27.028 But on inspections, oftentimes you do gotta get in crawl spaces. 00:05:27.028 --> 00:05:30.088 On one inspection, I found, the hard way a leaky toilet. 00:05:30.088 --> 00:05:32.728 The public health part of me was like, okay, I gotta clean up. 00:05:32.728 --> 00:05:36.028 But then also, obviously let the homeowner know what you found. 00:05:36.028 --> 00:05:38.428 'cause I'm not there as a contractor. 00:05:38.428 --> 00:05:40.649 I'm there as a public health official. 00:05:40.649 --> 00:05:41.699 So that was one thing. 00:05:41.699 --> 00:05:45.928 I also found a ton of booze bottles in a homeowner's crawlspace. 00:05:45.928 --> 00:05:51.884 And no you do Chad on a daily basis when you find those things, but I inform the homeowner of what I find. 00:05:51.884 --> 00:05:57.884 And he tells me later that was the impetus of them talking with their kid about some alcohol abuse problems. 00:05:57.884 --> 00:06:02.863 And it was actually, a good thing in the end that I found that. 00:06:02.863 --> 00:06:06.173 Just doing normal public health work, just letting 'em know what I find. 00:06:06.173 --> 00:06:15.403 So that's more of a serious note, on a serious, yet funny note on an inspection, once I found Walmart shopping bags being used as poly to seal a crawlspace

membrane. 00:06:15.704 --> 00:06:16.213 Wow. 00:06:16.514 --> 00:06:16.874 Yeah. 00:06:17.173 --> 00:06:17.564 Wow. 00:06:17.564 --> 00:06:19.783 What mill level do you think that is? 00:06:19.783 --> 00:06:20.894 Like 0.02? 00:06:20.894 --> 00:06:20.923 I 00:06:21.223 --> 00:06:22.394 don't even know. 00:06:22.394 --> 00:06:26.413 But yeah, it was super classy and it was right at the crawlspace entrance too. 00:06:26.413 --> 00:06:28.423 Nobody's gonna see it kind of thing. 00:06:28.423 --> 00:06:29.024 Right. 00:06:29.024 --> 00:06:29.954 It was ridiculous. 00:06:30.254 --> 00:06:31.663 I don't, that's a fine, that's a fine. 00:06:31.663 --> 00:06:31.783 I 00:06:32.084 --> 00:06:39.163 don't know if I've ever seen a Walmart bag that doesn't have a hole in it, let alone an entire crawlspace floor of bags that don't have holes in them. 00:06:39.463 --> 00:06:40.783 Exactly what I was thinking. 00:06:40.783 --> 00:06:42.494 Alright guys, so let's get into it. 00:06:42.494 --> 00:06:43.213 Let's kick off. 00:06:43.213 --> 00:06:47.144 So let's start off with the jobs that may haunt you. 00:06:47.444 --> 00:06:54.913 Yeah, and Diane, before we get into that, we maybe want to define what to us is a house from heck. 00:06:54.913 --> 00:07:00.413 We have in the industry have lovingly called houses that are difficult to fix houses from heck. 00:07:00.413 --> 00:07:09.598 In fact Daisy, had put a poll up on Nerds Facebook group and ask the question, what makes a difficult house to you? 00:07:09.598 --> 00:07:12.069 There was 25 respondents to that poll. 00:07:12.069 --> 00:07:18.178 One of the ones at the top of the list, like 16 of the 25 people said crawlspaces that don't have access. 00:07:18.178 --> 00:07:21.088 And it wasn't difficult to access. 00:07:21.088 --> 00:07:25.949 Or like inaccessible crawl spaces, like crawl spaces that are this tall. 00:07:25.949 --> 00:07:29.879 I say this tall and I'm showing you my hands and I forget that this is a podcast. 00:07:29.879 --> 00:07:30.869 You can't see that. 00:07:30.869 --> 00:07:34.569 But like you got six inches between the dirt and the floor joists. 00:07:34.569 --> 00:07:35.829 That's one scenario. 00:07:35.829 --> 00:07:36.459 That's tough. 00:07:36.459 --> 00:07:40.119 And sometimes, we could talk about that, but that's not what this podcast is about. 00:07:40.119 --> 00:07:47.394 But to me, and Josh and I have talked about this a lot, but to me, an inaccessible crawlspace does not make a house from heck. 00:07:47.394 --> 00:08:00.684 A client that is a pain in the butt doesn't make it a house from heck, a house that's a long ways away that you forgot to take the right size fan and pipe to, doesn't make it a house from heck. 00:08:00.684 --> 00:08:06.533 All those things make it difficult and you're losing money because of it, but it's not a house from heck. 00:08:06.533 --> 00:08:13.574 Your training hasn't necessarily taught you how to deal with the business side and maybe you lose some money,

but that's not what we're referring to when we refer to a house from heck. 00:08:13.574 --> 00:08:25.834 To me, when we refer from to a house from heck, we're talking about one that has radon entry from a weird location or radon entry that doesn't happen consistently over time. 00:08:25.834 --> 00:08:34.173 So we have either radon coming in from somewhere other than where we normally think of it coming from, or it's coming in when we're not there to, see where it's coming in. 00:08:34.173 --> 00:08:36.453 Josh, I know you have some thoughts on this as well. 00:08:36.754 --> 00:08:44.514 Coming from the construction side of things, oftentimes hear I can't get suction to this far corner of the basement, and I always ask why. 00:08:44.514 --> 00:08:49.433 Because everything you're looking at when you go into a home is mostly lipstick and mascara. 00:08:49.433 --> 00:08:55.583 It's finished carpentry work, it's drywall, it's carpeting, it's some flooring that could be removed. 00:08:55.583 --> 00:08:57.803 You could do your work and then put it back. 00:08:57.803 --> 00:09:01.193 Now, are you gonna do that for your initial $1,200 bid? 00:09:01.193 --> 00:09:05.964 No, I understand that, but that also doesn't make it a house from, heck. 00:09:05.964 --> 00:09:09.413 You need to figure out a pipe route and finishing to wrap up a job. 00:09:09.413 --> 00:09:19.793 That's different than, I threw all my training and all of the expertise at this house, but it still has a radon problem at least some of the time, if not all of the time. 00:09:19.793 --> 00:09:24.264 And so then now those are the head scratchers that we talk about, that we refer to as a house from Heck. 00:09:24.313 --> 00:09:29.653 Those really difficult ones that kind of like you said, Josh, it's, you're left scratching your head. 00:09:29.653 --> 00:09:29.803 Yeah. 00:09:29.803 --> 00:09:31.663 You asked what is the one that haunts me? 00:09:31.663 --> 00:09:36.244 And I have to go to, the house we fondly refer to as Skipper. 00:09:36.244 --> 00:09:41.634 There's definitely people that will listen to this podcast that have heard about Skipper already. 00:09:41.634 --> 00:09:51.683 When we were working on this house, I called probably 10 or 15 different colleagues across the country looking for insights into what in the world could be going on. 00:09:51.683 --> 00:09:55.504 When we first got to this house, it's part of a real estate transaction. 00:09:55.504 --> 00:10:00.303 The buyers have not moved in yet, but the house has just sold. 00:10:00.303 --> 00:10:03.043 Radon levels are like 50 picocuries per liter. 00:10:03.043 --> 00:10:12.014 Normally those are the really easy houses to fix because there's a lot of permeability in the soil and we typically don't have a lot of permeability in the soil where we're at. 00:10:12.024 --> 00:10:14.663 Chad, where are you at when you're dealing with This home? 00:10:15.144 --> 00:10:17.063 We're right in the middle of Kansas. 00:10:17.214 --> 00:10:20.144 You're in the middle of what we'd call clay country. 00:10:20.144 --> 00:10:24.163 It's typically non-porous soils underneath your slabs. 00:10:24.644 --> 00:10:25.453 That's correct, 00:10:25.604 --> 00:10:25.693 yeah. 00:10:25.693 --> 00:10:27.884 Meaning clay or wet clay. 00:10:28.214 --> 00:10:28.423 Mm-hmm. 00:10:28.663 --> 00:10:31.339 IE expansive soils some people may call them. 00:10:31.639 --> 00:10:34.443 And we don't even backfill with gravel. 00:10:34.443 --> 00:10:40.563 We don't have any gravel close to where we're at, so we backfill with sand if we're lucky. 00:10:40.714 --> 00:10:57.744 In your area when you get blazing hot radon like 50, much higher than the four we're looking for obviously there's always some sort of air pocket because the house is drawing on something where it's on levels, in some pocket of air somewhere touching the foundation. 00:10:57.744 --> 00:11:03.323 You're not gonna get a lot of air flow through your substrates like you're, like we just mentioned. 00:11:03.323 --> 00:11:08.094 So there's something nearby that is always going to be the problem. 00:11:08.094 --> 00:11:08.813 Where is it? 00:11:08.813 --> 00:11:10.823 That's the issue you gotta figure out. 00:11:10.823 --> 00:11:14.844 And it may not be a big area, we may be only talking a, a couple of square feet. 00:11:14.844 --> 00:11:15.144 Right. 00:11:15.443 --> 00:11:15.774 Right. 00:11:15.774 --> 00:11:22.283 On this house, when we put the system in, I was really surprised that the soil under the house was. 00:11:22.283 --> 00:11:25.524 It wasn't even backfilled chunky sand or something. 00:11:25.524 --> 00:11:30.313 Every once in a while we'll have a river or sand that has a little bit of pea gravel. 00:11:30.313 --> 00:11:32.083 Occasionally we'll run across some pea gravel. 00:11:32.083 --> 00:11:40.144 Because this was 50 to start with, I expected, oh, we're gonna have some pea gravel and it must extend way out, away from the house somewhere or something like that. 00:11:40.144 --> 00:11:42.724 Because, or there's been a ton of settling somewhere. 00:11:42.724 --> 00:11:44.073 We didn't see any of that. 00:11:44.073 --> 00:11:46.173 The, there was no cracks in the foundations. 00:11:46.173 --> 00:11:51.153 This house was like, it was exactly the day it was built is, and it was built in 1963. 00:11:51.153 --> 00:11:54.783 To give everybody an idea, it's a rectangular, ranch house. 00:11:54.783 --> 00:11:59.254 28 feet deep and 45 feet long, the standard ranch house that you see all the time. 00:11:59.254 --> 00:12:01.953 It has a 20 by 20 crawl space on the back of it. 00:12:01.953 --> 00:12:08.644 Off to the right side of the standard rectangle part of the ranch house, there's a single car garage. 00:12:08.644 --> 00:12:16.994 On the back entry into the crawl space, there is a patio that's sitting on top of the foundation wall, so a possible radon entry point there. 00:12:16.994 --> 00:12:20.323 The front patio is also sitting on

top of the foundation wall. 00:12:20.323 --> 00:12:22.183 So a possible radon entry point there. 00:12:22.183 --> 00:12:24.104 We know that going into this. 00:12:24.104 --> 00:12:26.114 We know there's possible radon entry points. 00:12:26.114 --> 00:12:30.524 We're not really worried about it because typically they don't cause problems for us. 00:12:30.524 --> 00:12:42.033 Anyway, we get there, we put the system in, we've got good suction under almost all of the slab of the basement, and we've got great suction in the crawl space. 00:12:42.033 --> 00:12:46.033 We don't address the two patios or the garage at this point. 00:12:46.033 --> 00:12:52.734 There's one corner of the basement that we've got like a pascal of negative pressure when we have a pascal of positive pressure without the fan. 00:12:52.734 --> 00:12:55.583 So baseline pressure of a pascal of positive. 00:12:55.583 --> 00:12:58.163 So we have some driving force for radon to come in. 00:12:58.474 --> 00:13:04.578 In, in your baseline, you're getting positive one pascal, kind of everywhere in the basement. 00:13:04.578 --> 00:13:08.149 And so you're trying to beat that positive one Pascal, with your radon system. 00:13:08.149 --> 00:13:09.198 You put it in. 00:13:09.198 --> 00:13:16.428 You do your pressure field extension testing and it shows that you've got negative pressure anywhere where you're testing through the floor, right? 00:13:16.729 --> 00:13:17.719 The time that we're there, 00:13:18.019 --> 00:13:18.239 yes. 00:13:18.239 --> 00:13:18.443 Okay. 00:13:18.443 --> 00:13:22.553 So you should be winning the radon game if the radons coming from underneath the floor. 00:13:23.004 --> 00:13:23.514 Correct? 00:13:23.933 --> 00:13:24.053 Yep. 00:13:24.053 --> 00:13:24.158 Okay. 00:13:24.458 --> 00:13:26.563 And where are we winning the radon game? 00:13:26.563 --> 00:13:27.254 So we come back. 00:13:27.254 --> 00:13:29.354 Yeah, I was gonna ask, were you winning the radon game then at that point? 00:13:29.688 --> 00:13:32.719 When they did the original test, it was summertime. 00:13:32.719 --> 00:13:36.889 When we were there to put the radon system in to begin with, it was the beginning of November. 00:13:36.889 --> 00:13:41.089 The radon levels post mitigation were 150. 00:13:41.089 --> 00:13:41.688 Whoa. 00:13:41.688 --> 00:13:41.869 Yikes. 00:13:41.869 --> 00:13:42.708 In Kansas. 00:13:42.708 --> 00:13:43.609 In Kansas. 00:13:43.609 --> 00:13:47.119 I have never seen, well, only one other time have I ever seen 150. 00:13:47.119 --> 00:13:49.649 And that wasn't a consistent 150. 00:13:49.649 --> 00:13:51.808 This was consistent 150. 00:13:51.808 --> 00:13:57.198 So the previous one I'd seen, we'd have spikes to 150, but it didn't stay that high all the time. 00:13:57.198 --> 00:13:58.759 This is weird, right? 00:13:58.759 --> 00:14:06.318 In order for tight soils to allow enough air movement to get up to 150, that is just weird and mind blowing. 00:14:06.318 --> 00:14:09.418 I

can't imagine how this is working. 00:14:09.418 --> 00:14:12.759 First thing I do is I verify PFE. 00:14:12.759 --> 00:14:14.399 Because that's what we've gotta do. 00:14:14.399 --> 00:14:15.658 Do we have PFE? 00:14:15.658 --> 00:14:16.048 Okay. 00:14:16.048 --> 00:14:16.558 Yeah. 00:14:16.708 --> 00:14:18.389 Hey Chad, can I, can I interrupt? 00:14:18.389 --> 00:14:21.394 Most of us know, but can you explain what PFE is? 00:14:21.693 --> 00:14:24.264 PFE is, an acronym for pressure field extension. 00:14:24.264 --> 00:14:31.073 It's an amount of suction that we have under the slab created because of the radon system. 00:14:31.073 --> 00:14:44.813 If we change the pressure relationship in the house from the positive pressure in the soil to having negative pressure in the soil relative to the house, then the air in the house wants to go into the soil rather than the soil air wanting come into the house. 00:14:44.813 --> 00:14:53.874 That's the basics of everything we do is can we make the soil air go into the, or the house, air go into the soil instead of allowing the soil air to come into the house. 00:14:54.173 --> 00:14:54.323 Got it. 00:14:54.474 --> 00:14:57.203 We're doing that at this house except for. 00:14:57.203 --> 00:15:08.344 We don't know what's happening under the front and back patio slab, we don't know what's happening under the garage slab, but we're done chasing the crawlspace and we're done chasing the basement slab. 00:15:08.344 --> 00:15:16.734 Except for we don't know over time that the basement slab is always staying negative pressure relative to in the basement. 00:15:16.734 --> 00:15:24.234 To clarify, you said you're done chasing those two foundations because you've tested it for your pressure field and you're showing negative pressure anytime you're there. 00:15:24.234 --> 00:15:27.553 In all four corners of the basement and the crawlspace, you got it pegged. 00:15:27.553 --> 00:15:28.364 You're good to go. 00:15:28.364 --> 00:15:28.663 Right? 00:15:28.663 --> 00:15:29.563 Presumably right. 00:15:29.563 --> 00:15:33.162 In the end, those numbers on the surface, on paper show good signs. 00:15:33.162 --> 00:15:38.231 But it's your radon monitor over the next 2, 3, 4 days that are really gonna tell you how you won the game or not. 00:15:38.231 --> 00:15:41.261 We always have to verify with the radon test, that's the most important thing. 00:15:41.261 --> 00:15:42.701 We're fixing the radon problem, right? 00:15:42.701 --> 00:15:44.621 We had negative pressure, like we want. 00:15:44.621 --> 00:15:45.851 Not fixing the radon problem. 00:15:45.851 --> 00:15:53.442 I'm not gonna put in another suction point in the basement until I know for sure that the basement is belching every once in a while or something like that. 00:15:53.442 --> 00:15:58.101 We get out a data logger, that logs the pressure in the floor. 00:15:58.101 --> 00:16:03.142 We run a radon test and a pressure test over time, and we can compare those two sets

of data. 00:16:03.142 --> 00:16:08.912 We found out that we always have negative pressure in the floor we don't always have negative radon. 00:16:08.912 --> 00:16:11.251 In fact, the radon is consistently elevated. 00:16:11.251 --> 00:16:16.692 This goes on for a couple weeks, a couple of back and forths, and it's beginning of December by this point. 00:16:16.692 --> 00:16:18.381 It's cold all the time. 00:16:18.381 --> 00:16:22.282 Radon novels in this basement are now 250 plus. 00:16:22.282 --> 00:16:26.721 And we don't know how high it is because our radon monitors only go up to 250. 00:16:26.721 --> 00:16:29.001 It may be even a little worse than that. 00:16:29.001 --> 00:16:33.302 The weird thing was we had a radon monitor in the center of the basement. 00:16:33.302 --> 00:16:35.761 We actually had 13 radon monitors in this house. 00:16:35.761 --> 00:16:40.461 At one point we had a radon monitor in the crawlspace, six radon monitors spread out through the basement. 00:16:40.461 --> 00:16:48.292 We had radon monitors upstairs above the crawlspace, radon monitors in the bedrooms, a radon monitor in the garage, and absolutely nothing showed off. 00:16:48.591 --> 00:16:50.871 It gave, the radon was just the same, pretty much everywhere. 00:16:51.172 --> 00:16:53.991 It wasn't really the same everywhere. 00:16:53.991 --> 00:16:56.111 The center of the basement was the highest. 00:16:56.111 --> 00:16:58.782 But none of the corners where you would think. 00:16:58.782 --> 00:17:00.682 We know that we're controlling the floor. 00:17:00.682 --> 00:17:06.112 We know that we're controlling the crawl space, so it's radon has to be coming in through the walls somewhere. 00:17:06.261 --> 00:17:06.622 Right. 00:17:06.622 --> 00:17:13.842 And you've got poured walls in all your houses down there because they've gotta be structurally sound enough to hold back the water and the clay. 00:17:14.142 --> 00:17:20.642 Almost all houses are poured concrete, we're not dealing with block wall foundations that are porous and that kind of stuff. 00:17:20.701 --> 00:17:20.942 Yeah. 00:17:20.942 --> 00:17:23.612 You're not gonna have a whole ton of air coming through your walls at all. 00:17:23.771 --> 00:17:30.102 If we have radon coming through the walls, it's likely that it's an intentional penetration. 00:17:30.102 --> 00:17:30.342 Right. 00:17:30.342 --> 00:17:33.821 Like a sewer line that's been abandoned or something like that. 00:17:33.821 --> 00:17:40.666 That's the kind of things we were looking for was where's the sewer line that's been abandoned or the hole in the wall. 00:17:40.817 --> 00:17:43.426 You also talked about the adjacent slabs too. 00:17:43.426 --> 00:17:45.227 You haven't touched on how you explored those. 00:17:45.636 --> 00:17:46.537 Yeah, good point. 00:17:46.537 --> 00:17:56.517 One of the first things we did, around the same time period where we got the data logger out we also put temporary systems on the front patio, the back patio, and in

the garage. 00:17:56.517 --> 00:17:59.336 We got negative pressure between the garage and the house. 00:17:59.336 --> 00:18:05.156 And actually the garage system made the negative pressure in the basement even more negative. 00:18:05.156 --> 00:18:10.616 It was going down the wall between the basement and the house and creating more negative pressure under the basement slab. 00:18:10.616 --> 00:18:14.997 And we were getting great negative pressure under the front patio and under the back patio. 00:18:14.997 --> 00:18:18.116 We've taken all of those things out of the picture. 00:18:18.116 --> 00:18:20.027 We don't need those temporary systems. 00:18:20.027 --> 00:18:23.416 They're not affecting the, those areas are not affecting the radon problem. 00:18:23.416 --> 00:18:24.767 So where's the radon coming from? 00:18:24.767 --> 00:18:30.960 We know that everywhere that we've tested, we've got negative pressure relative to the house. 00:18:30.960 --> 00:18:33.410 We don't need to touch that anymore. 00:18:33.410 --> 00:18:41.009 But there's something somewhere, there's a conduit that's coming from somewhere that's allowing radon, allowing soil gas into your house. 00:18:41.529 --> 00:18:44.582 There's a preferential pathway still unaddressed somehow. 00:18:44.582 --> 00:18:46.422 But where the heck is it? 00:18:46.721 --> 00:18:46.991 Yeah. 00:18:46.991 --> 00:18:51.511 Up until this point, you haven't seen anything that would indicate that you have a source there for that. 00:18:51.511 --> 00:18:51.811 Right? 00:18:52.162 --> 00:18:52.551 Right. 00:18:52.551 --> 00:19:01.352 Chad ruled out any sources that may be stored there, whether it be pottery paints glow in the dark radium watches, rock collections, that kind of thing. 00:19:01.352 --> 00:19:02.211 That's all been removed. 00:19:02.211 --> 00:19:06.872 And you kind of know it that's been removed too in the fact that the radon levels jump around. 00:19:06.872 --> 00:19:14.402 Where if you have an internal source in the ventilation rate of a house kind of stays the same, your radon level in that case would stay roughly the same. 00:19:14.402 --> 00:19:16.412 It wouldn't jump around like in this case it did. 00:19:16.612 --> 00:19:17.001 Yeah. 00:19:17.001 --> 00:19:23.172 One of the conversations I had was with Bill Broadhead, and he's like, I've had a similar scenario to what you had". 00:19:23.172 --> 00:19:23.991 He's like. 00:19:23.991 --> 00:19:27.961 This house, was built early on, and it had a septic sewer system. 00:19:27.961 --> 00:19:31.372 They abandoned the septic sewer system and went to city sewer. 00:19:31.372 --> 00:19:37.102 And they just cut the pipe off inside the house and it was just open to the septic sewer. 00:19:37.102 --> 00:19:43.102 The drainage field out in the yard was just pumping soil gas in through this hole in the wall. 00:19:43.102 --> 00:19:49.832 The difference is, I found a hotspot in the house and I knew that I needed to cut the wall open in that area. 00:19:49.832 --> 00:20:02.652 And the homeowner was let's go ahead and cut the wall open." The other thing that I haven't explained is: there's carpet on, 75% of the floor of this basement, and three quarters of the walls are drywalled and finished. 00:20:02.652 --> 00:20:04.031 Actually, let me take that back. 00:20:04.031 --> 00:20:06.281 90% of the walls were drywalled. 00:20:06.281 --> 00:20:10.842 They ended up having a plumbing problem and they had to cut out drywall on one of the walls. 00:20:10.842 --> 00:20:13.511 I got to see inside the walls on a third of the walls. 00:20:13.511 --> 00:20:17.001 There's no plumbing pipes coming into the walls on that section. 00:20:17.001 --> 00:20:27.491 One other thing that it could be, again, something that Josh has reminded me about before is that if there was a well in this house, which is uncommon in our part of the country, but it happens occasionally. 00:20:27.491 --> 00:20:33.561 Then maybe it just didn't get covered up or capped off right and it's just letting radon come in. 00:20:33.561 --> 00:20:40.781 So I called the realtor and I was like, Hey, is there any way I could talk to the original owners of this house? 00:20:40.781 --> 00:20:42.192 And she's like, oh, they're older. 00:20:42.192 --> 00:20:45.102 Let me just give 'em a call and I'll ask if they had a well in there. 00:20:45.102 --> 00:20:45.912 She calls me back. 00:20:45.912 --> 00:20:50.251 Yeah, no, well, or any other plumbing situation or whatever. 00:20:50.251 --> 00:20:56.352 The homeowners did have a septic to begin with and they went to city sewer. 00:20:56.352 --> 00:21:02.192 After I talked to Bill, I explored that possibility forever and ended up finding absolutely nothing. 00:21:02.192 --> 00:21:08.672 I even stuck my sniffer down in the sewer clean out to see if there was high radon in the sewer. 00:21:08.672 --> 00:21:09.541 Nothing. 00:21:09.541 --> 00:21:12.311 It's less than ambient in the sewer. 00:21:12.311 --> 00:21:14.561 I'm okay, that's not what it is. 00:21:14.561 --> 00:21:16.662 I'm just scratching my head and. 00:21:16.662 --> 00:21:28.731 I ended up getting a Geiger counter from K State at one point from the radiation nuclear engineering department They loaned me a Geiger counter to see if any of the walls were hot somewhere. 00:21:28.731 --> 00:21:37.821 We're not gonna be able to see radon necessarily, but if there's a whole bunch of decay products plated out somewhere, maybe I'll be able to see some gamma coming through from that. 00:21:37.821 --> 00:21:38.902 Can't see anything. 00:21:38.902 --> 00:21:43.057 I scanned every inch of every wall and I'm not finding anything. 00:21:43.057 --> 00:21:44.436 I'm getting super frustrated. 00:21:44.436 --> 00:21:57.896 I actually have the radiation folks from the state of Kansas come out because I was like, these homeowners are gonna think that I'm absolutely incompetent at this point because I've been here for three months trying to figure this out.

00:21:57.896 --> 00:22:02.013 The state, radiation folks came out and it was awesome. 00:22:02.013 --> 00:22:05.973 For them to reassure the homeowners that we're doing the right thing. 00:22:05.973 --> 00:22:08.054 We're trying everything we can. 00:22:08.054 --> 00:22:13.003 They loaned me their $7,000 sniffer, which unfortunately never helped. 00:22:13.003 --> 00:22:14.525 But it was cool. 00:22:14.618 --> 00:22:18.483 Did it just tell you the same thing your own sniffer did, your much cheaper sniffer? 00:22:18.784 --> 00:22:19.564 More or less. 00:22:19.773 --> 00:22:21.334 So now how many gadgets are we at now? 00:22:21.334 --> 00:22:28.999 You're at a, you're at two sniffers, you're at a data logger, you're at all your different radon monitors, your 13 monitors your micro manometers. 00:22:29.298 --> 00:22:32.403 Yeah, probably four micro manometers. 00:22:32.403 --> 00:22:34.243 We've got what else? 00:22:34.394 --> 00:22:36.693 A ton detectors of one way or another. 00:22:36.693 --> 00:22:37.513 Pressure. 00:22:37.513 --> 00:22:38.263 Radon. 00:22:38.263 --> 00:22:39.074 Airflow. 00:22:39.374 --> 00:22:39.763 Yeah. 00:22:39.763 --> 00:22:46.153 There's also a company, they have made a device that's like an infrared camera for radiation. 00:22:46.153 --> 00:22:50.983 And I don't have the name of the company offhand, but they loaned me this device. 00:22:50.983 --> 00:22:58.144 I have no idea how much this thing costs, but they just mailed it to me and said, if you find the source because of this, it'll be good for us. 00:22:58.144 --> 00:23:02.354 And I was like, I really appreciate it and I will use it to see if I can find it. 00:23:02.354 --> 00:23:12.973 I left that there for several days and pointed it in different directions and left it set up for 24 hours as we moved around that house and tried to see if we could find any significant buildup of decay products. 00:23:12.973 --> 00:23:18.824 But the background was so high that it's just seeing radiation everywhere all the time. 00:23:18.824 --> 00:23:21.403 And it never found a source. 00:23:21.624 --> 00:23:28.253 Everything that you've had in your toolbox and all your friends' toolboxes have been thrown at this house. 00:23:28.253 --> 00:23:28.733 Yeah. 00:23:28.733 --> 00:23:30.804 It's still nothing, still no clear answers. 00:23:31.193 --> 00:23:31.374 And so. 00:23:31.374 --> 00:23:33.683 Until one thing happens... 00:23:33.733 --> 00:23:44.794 i'm talking to the homeowner at this point "I'm gonna have to cut open all of your walls and tear up all your carpet." And they're like, okay, if we need to do that, we'll do that." We were thinking about replacing the carpet anyway. 00:23:44.794 --> 00:23:50.344 They have a bunch of gun safes down there and that's gonna be the difficult part is to move the gun safes back off of the carpet. 00:23:50.344 --> 00:23:52.413 But we can make it happen if we need to. 00:23:52.413 --> 00:23:59.304 I know there's a conduit for radon somewhere and I'm not gonna just start putting suction points everywhere because it's not gonna help. 00:23:59.304 --> 00:24:03.503 We've already proved that all of the normal places aren't what's supplying the radon. 00:24:03.503 --> 00:24:12.294 One of the things that came outta the conversation with state of Kansas folks, was you have got to call the original owners of this house yourself. 00:24:12.294 --> 00:24:13.423 Yeah, you're right. 00:24:13.423 --> 00:24:14.634 I called the realtor back. 00:24:14.634 --> 00:24:22.554 I get the phone number for the people that own the house originally and get on the phone with the lady that built the house in 1963. 00:24:22.554 --> 00:24:25.713 She's still alive, and her mind is clear, as a bell. 00:24:25.713 --> 00:24:28.963 I asked her the first thing, "Is there a well in the basement by any chance? 00:24:28.963 --> 00:24:29.834 Or something like that. 00:24:29.834 --> 00:24:33.763 And she says, "oh yeah, there was a well in the basement 65 feet deep. 00:24:33.763 --> 00:24:39.733 We didn't have any water coming out of it, or not enough water, so we drill another well in the backyard." I said, wait a minute. 00:24:39.733 --> 00:24:49.794 I know about the one in the backyard, because I've stuck my sniffer in it and done all the things and tried to see if there's some way that there's radon getting from their end of the house. 00:24:49.794 --> 00:24:51.983 And she's yeah, that's the second well. 00:24:51.983 --> 00:24:59.794 I told you we had a first well in the house underneath the area where the water softener is." I was like, I've been all over the place... 00:24:59.794 --> 00:25:04.183 i've never lifted the brine tank on the water softener to see if it's underneath there. 00:25:04.183 --> 00:25:09.713 And I've had radon monitors in that area of the basement, right on top of the brine tank. 00:25:09.713 --> 00:25:12.144 And it came up less than in the middle of the house. 00:25:12.144 --> 00:25:13.203 I'm all confused. 00:25:13.203 --> 00:25:17.406 This is in the beginning of March, region seven has just happened. 00:25:17.406 --> 00:25:22.896 Josh came down for region seven and I was like, "Hey Josh, do you wanna go to this skipper house? 00:25:22.896 --> 00:25:30.747 On our way back to Salina", he's like, "yeah, I'd love to do that." I had just literally just found out that there was a well in this one corner of the basement. 00:25:30.747 --> 00:25:33.307 I go down there and I'm like, Josh, push the brine tank back. 00:25:33.307 --> 00:25:36.547 I'm gonna look underneath it and see if there's a well head under there. 00:25:36.547 --> 00:25:40.626 I stick my hand on the floor to balance myself to look underneath the brine tank. 00:25:40.626 --> 00:25:45.487 And there's air blowing on my hand, not from under the brine tank, but from the wall site. 00:25:45.487 --> 00:25:50.196 There's a wall right by the brine tank, and it's blowing from the wall. 00:25:50.196 --> 00:25:56.386 I'm confused and I'm like, Josh, I

think I feel air blowing out from underneath this wall. 00:25:56.386 --> 00:26:01.557 He sticks his hand down there and he says, yeah, there's air blowing from out from underneath the wall. 00:26:01.557 --> 00:26:08.856 I get a knife or a scraper or something, I start messing around and there's all this rotten wood that I hadn't noticed before. 00:26:08.856 --> 00:26:11.116 I pick at it a little bit and it goes plunk. 00:26:11.116 --> 00:26:17.987 65 feet down into the well hole, it's wide open underneath the wall, this well head. 00:26:17.987 --> 00:26:21.856 We eventually end up cutting out the wall and capping that and everything. 00:26:21.856 --> 00:26:31.886 When Josh and I were there, we were estimating that there was probably 10 CFM coming out of that wellhead just naturally, it was 1700 picocuries per liter in that well. 00:26:31.886 --> 00:26:40.616 That's enough to supply 255 PICOCURIES per liter to the entire basement of this house and 90 or a hundred picocuries per liter upstairs. 00:26:40.767 --> 00:26:48.896 Within 15 inches of that well head, you had a hole through the floor measuring pressure, field extension, and it showed that you had negative pressure. 00:26:49.317 --> 00:26:55.497 I did have negative pressure eight inches away from the wellhead, but not in the wellhead. 00:26:55.497 --> 00:27:03.967 I have like five pascals of negative pressure, which is enough for any season to fix the radon problem, but it doesn't, didn't go down into the wellhead. 00:27:03.967 --> 00:27:08.166 So we just capped the wellhead, applied suction to the wellhead radon problem goes away. 00:27:08.166 --> 00:27:12.366 We probably didn't have to do anything else to the entire house. 00:27:12.366 --> 00:27:15.192 But we didn't know it was there because it was buried underneath the wall. 00:27:15.612 --> 00:27:17.791 What challenge skipper was, for sure. 00:27:17.791 --> 00:27:22.061 How long was your whole time there from beginning to mitigation completion? 00:27:22.362 --> 00:27:23.201 Four months. 00:27:23.501 --> 00:27:28.241 And imagine the prior homeowner stayed in, lived in that house for 40 years, 00:27:28.632 --> 00:27:29.352 60 years. 00:27:29.352 --> 00:27:30.821 The house was built in 63. 00:27:31.122 --> 00:27:31.842 Wow. 00:27:31.842 --> 00:27:32.711 Wow. 00:27:32.711 --> 00:27:33.311 Wow. 00:27:33.372 --> 00:27:33.731 That's an. 00:27:33.731 --> 00:27:34.632 Amazing. 00:27:34.632 --> 00:27:38.951 I'm sure you don't have many like that, Chad, but boy, that was a, that was an adventure for you. 00:27:38.951 --> 00:27:41.201 I would be out of business if they were all like that. 00:27:41.201 --> 00:27:42.852 We know that wells are a problem. 00:27:42.852 --> 00:27:45.971 It's just finding the Well that was the problem. 00:27:46.122 --> 00:27:52.332 And more common construction nowadays that we don't have wells within the living structure of the building. 00:27:52.332 --> 00:27:59.037 They're outside, but all around the country, there are wells within the walls of the building. 00:27:59.037 --> 00:28:10.076 And if that's the case, that well shaft goes down dozens if not hundreds of feet into fractured earth, which is just a basic water filled cave. 00:28:10.076 --> 00:28:12.896 And if it's not full of water, it's full of soil gas. 00:28:12.896 --> 00:28:18.386 And those things can pump tons of radon in and out of the basement very quickly. 00:28:18.386 --> 00:28:21.086 And you just happen to find one or another one. 00:28:21.491 --> 00:28:22.692 And hidden pretty well. 00:28:22.696 --> 00:28:47.787 The takeaway from all of that is if we weren't doing diagnostics as part of this, if we didn't know what the suction pressures were, we would've just had to give up because there's no way we would've just put suction points all over the basement and had systems on the front patios and back patios and everything, and we would've never found the problem because we wouldn't know that, oh yeah, all this other extraneous stuff is not actually doing any good. 00:28:47.936 --> 00:28:53.487 That's a very common response though in the industry is that we're just gonna add a suction point in an area. 00:28:53.487 --> 00:29:00.186 We think where the radon might be coming in next, where you think it's coming in without actually verifying, is a foolish decision. 00:29:00.186 --> 00:29:01.747 'cause you're just gonna be chasing your tail. 00:29:01.747 --> 00:29:06.247 You actually ruled out the fact that we don't need any more because we have it captured. 00:29:06.247 --> 00:29:07.747 There's something else going on. 00:29:07.747 --> 00:29:19.946 It's actually, it took a little bit more time, but it's a way less intrusive process in this regard, than just throwing arbitrarily suction point 2, 3, 4, or system two or three on a house. 00:29:19.946 --> 00:29:23.007 I cringe when I see more than one system on a single family home. 00:29:23.007 --> 00:29:24.207 It's usually never needed. 00:29:24.207 --> 00:29:28.356 But contractors will do it because they don't know any better. 00:29:28.356 --> 00:29:31.176 They're not confident in their ability to get the proper numbers. 00:29:31.477 --> 00:29:31.777 Right. 00:29:31.781 --> 00:29:33.551 Chad, you were very methodical going through it. 00:29:33.551 --> 00:29:38.652 If I were the homeowner, and how you explained it you checked every box that you had to go through. 00:29:38.652 --> 00:29:39.912 Every gadget was used. 00:29:39.912 --> 00:29:42.071 As a homeowner, you were the right guy to be there. 00:29:42.372 --> 00:29:43.511 We'd like to think so. 00:29:43.511 --> 00:29:51.336 And that's, that's honestly, that's the way the entire industry should be, is like we know what we're doing, we're professional about it. 00:29:51.336 --> 00:29:55.207 We're technical experts in the field that we're working in. 00:29:55.207 --> 00:30:01.866 And all of those tools in the toolbox are the things that we use to fix this problem. 00:30:01.866 --> 00:30:05.326 And it's

not every house that has these kind of problems. 00:30:05.326 --> 00:30:15.616 But the ones that come up, if we can't fix 'em, then the homeowner's lose faith in our entire industry because they're like, "we had a house they just said it was too hard to fix." And that should never be the case. 00:30:16.007 --> 00:30:16.217 Yeah. 00:30:16.217 --> 00:30:17.086 It should never be the case. 00:30:17.086 --> 00:30:18.886 'cause there's not a house we can't fix. 00:30:18.886 --> 00:30:20.957 The numbers will guide the decisions. 00:30:20.957 --> 00:30:25.366 If you apply the building science properly, you're gonna fix every house, period. 00:30:26.106 --> 00:30:33.382 Before we jump into the next story, I want to take a quick moment to thank our listeners and share something that makes this conversation—and this entire podcast—possible. 00:30:33.382 --> 00:30:37.573 Being part of the Indoor Environments Association means you’re not alone. 00:30:37.573 --> 00:30:47.405 You’re joining a network of over 1,000 professionals who care about indoor air quality and are working together to grow their businesses, increase public awareness, and influence public policy. 00:30:47.405 --> 00:30:52.083 Join today and get access to the IEA Community, your peers, and your future allies. 00:30:52.083 --> 00:30:56.398 Just one hundred and ninety nine dollars a year—that’s only $16.59 cents a month. 00:30:56.398 --> 00:30:58.906 Visit indoorenvironments.org to become a member. 00:30:58.906 --> 00:31:00.625 Now, let’s get back to the episode. 00:31:01.404 --> 00:31:02.221 Really logical. 00:31:02.221 --> 00:31:03.392 Alright, what's next? 00:31:03.692 --> 00:31:10.122 There's handfuls of projects, I mentioned earlier in the podcast that, I don't get to see kind of the normal projects. 00:31:10.122 --> 00:31:13.571 Contractors call me when they run into problems like Chad called me. 00:31:13.571 --> 00:31:17.781 I get contractors locally that'll call Hey, I've got a difficult project. 00:31:17.781 --> 00:31:18.922 I've done X, Y, and Z. 00:31:18.922 --> 00:31:24.467 Can you come help me?" I don't see normal projects, like a drain tile system up and out. 00:31:24.467 --> 00:31:25.576 Real simple things. 00:31:25.576 --> 00:31:31.396 I see real complex houses, multiple foundations, giant houses, castles on lakes. 00:31:31.396 --> 00:31:37.376 I deal with clay soils, wet soils to sandy soils, to gravel soils, you name it. 00:31:37.376 --> 00:31:38.737 We have it all up here. 00:31:38.737 --> 00:31:45.037 When in this case it skipper Chad ran into kind of an airflow, a higher flow than he would normally expect to see. 00:31:45.037 --> 00:31:50.257 He deals with usually low airflow systems where I can deal with big airflow systems. 00:31:50.257 --> 00:31:56.011 Systems where we have pressure field extension almost all the time except when we don't. 00:31:56.011 --> 00:32:00.801 It's a whole different, our other side of the spectrum monster than what Chad could run into. 00:32:01.112 --> 00:32:10.132 Before you continue on that thought, you said I had a higher airflow situation than I normally would do you know how much air I had to move out of that well? 00:32:10.132 --> 00:32:12.432 In order to depressurize the Well. 00:32:12.731 --> 00:32:16.561 I do, you needed like 10 ccfm to properly capture that well. 00:32:16.561 --> 00:32:22.291 That's an additional 10 CFM that maybe the 15 you had in your other part of your system. 00:32:22.602 --> 00:32:23.352 It was higher flow. 00:32:23.352 --> 00:32:24.731 'cause we had 25 cfm. 00:32:25.031 --> 00:32:25.301 Yeah. 00:32:25.301 --> 00:32:26.622 Versus your normal 15. 00:32:26.622 --> 00:32:31.142 Where common systems in my area twin Cities area of Minnesota. 00:32:31.142 --> 00:32:34.682 We're talking probably 40 CFM, give or take 20 either way. 00:32:34.682 --> 00:32:38.811 If we see stuff much lower than that, it's gonna be on expansive or tight. 00:32:38.811 --> 00:32:40.521 Clay soils, wet soils. 00:32:40.521 --> 00:32:58.172 However more than that, then we're dealing with higher airflow contributors, whether it's string tile with weeper tile, weeper hoses from concrete block walls, or geologic foundations either KARST which is a fractured limestone bedrock, that some of our houses get built on. 00:32:58.172 --> 00:33:01.271 Or glacial moraine, where the glaciers came in. 00:33:01.271 --> 00:33:07.602 And this isn't just centric to Minnesota, but anywhere where the glaciers from Canada came, dropped a bunch of stones and then retreated. 00:33:07.602 --> 00:33:15.582 Then the top of the year, those stones got overlaid by top soil, but underneath you had got a big air void of caverns. 00:33:15.582 --> 00:33:23.801 If you're driving around where I live and work, somewhere underneath you are big old cobbles, bigger than my head, which is hard to believe by some people. 00:33:23.801 --> 00:33:29.402 The problem then is you have to deal with a whole lot of airflow in order to fix a radon problem in some cases. 00:33:29.402 --> 00:33:33.481 You also have to deal with mother nature, more so than you would in tight soils. 00:33:33.481 --> 00:33:39.192 An example I have is actually an entire subdivision built with radon resistant new construction features. 00:33:39.192 --> 00:33:42.491 House after house built in the subdivision are built on hills. 00:33:42.491 --> 00:33:44.922 There's hills and valleys within the subdivision. 00:33:44.922 --> 00:33:51.271 And had one really proactive homeowner who had, done a bunch of radon tests and week to week it would fluctuate. 00:33:51.271 --> 00:33:54.991 No matter the season, she could get a high result and she could get a low result. 00:33:54.991 --> 00:33:58.582 She called me in and I turned her basement into a laboratory. 00:33:58.582 --> 00:34:00.402 It's a fairly modern house. 00:34:00.402 --> 00:34:05.981 In Minnesota, we got pretty strict energy code requirements, our houses are built tight, but ventilated right. 00:34:05.981

--> 00:34:14.851 In this case, I could get the indoor pressure in the house to 20 Pascals negative just by turning on the exhaust fans. 00:34:14.851 --> 00:34:17.552 The building, the outside structure is quite tight. 00:34:17.552 --> 00:34:25.561 They come tighter than that, but in this case it was about 20 pascals where I can actually just by triggering the fans that are commonly using the house. 00:34:25.561 --> 00:34:27.211 That's gonna induce a radon problem. 00:34:27.376 --> 00:34:34.237 You're talking about you turned on the bathroom fans, the fans fan over the range in the kitchen, the dryer. 00:34:34.387 --> 00:34:34.536 Yep. 00:34:34.536 --> 00:34:40.777 So all the exhaust fans in the house went 20 Pascals negative relative to outside or relative to the soil? 00:34:41.126 --> 00:34:42.086 Relative to outside. 00:34:42.387 --> 00:34:43.677 That is insane. 00:34:43.677 --> 00:34:48.956 That's half a blower or test worth of negative pressure just by the exhaust fans. 00:34:49.257 --> 00:34:53.847 I've actually seen houses that can do their own blower door test without the blower door. 00:34:53.847 --> 00:34:59.007 But in this case this house had all the radon resistant features that are required by building code. 00:34:59.007 --> 00:35:06.146 It's got the gravel layer, the poly vapor barrier, and then a three inch vent stack up through the roof connected to the drain tile in this case. 00:35:06.416 --> 00:35:10.657 So they don't need they don't need to do a radon test because they have a radon system. 00:35:11.067 --> 00:35:11.916 Au contraire. 00:35:11.916 --> 00:35:18.117 In fact, I wish it's another, another topic for another podcast is testing newly constructed homes. 00:35:18.117 --> 00:35:18.896 We gotta do it. 00:35:19.197 --> 00:35:19.556 Yes. 00:35:19.836 --> 00:35:21.246 Homeowner's concerned. 00:35:21.246 --> 00:35:26.016 I get there, drill probably eight to 10 holes on the floor to get pressure field numbers. 00:35:26.016 --> 00:35:28.266 And the day I was there, everything was great. 00:35:28.266 --> 00:35:34.327 Negative pressure in all four corners and the half walls in between, or should say midpoint the walls in between. 00:35:34.327 --> 00:35:58.166 Everything looks good, except I know that at some point it's not gonna be good because the continuous radon data shows me that for two days, three days, it's fine and then all of a sudden, bam, it spikes, and I don't mean spikes to five or 10, I mean spikes to 150, for a handful of hours and then drops back down to what, let's call it background again, and then bam, it spikes again in another three or four days. 00:35:58.166 --> 00:36:02.907 So I'm checking this out and I'm also data logging side by side with the radon data. 00:36:02.907 --> 00:36:08.067 Every time the radon spikes, I'm losing my pressure field extension in certain parts of the basement. 00:36:08.067 --> 00:36:12.806 And not just losing it, like going from positive or negative five to positive five. 00:36:12.806 --> 00:36:16.077 I'm going from like negative 20 to Positive 70. 00:36:16.077 --> 00:36:16.617 What? 00:36:16.916 --> 00:36:17.277 Yes. 00:36:17.277 --> 00:36:18.146 70. 00:36:18.266 --> 00:36:18.867 That's pretty big. 00:36:18.867 --> 00:36:19.226 Yes. 00:36:19.226 --> 00:36:25.277 Hillside built house, and as the wind can suck and blow it can drive. 00:36:25.277 --> 00:36:27.226 I've measured these pressure changes. 00:36:27.226 --> 00:36:35.306 I've actually measured over time 150 Pascal pressure change just in one PFE location in a given home. 00:36:35.306 --> 00:36:41.677 We think we have robust systems installed, but we got nothing compared to what mother nature can throw at us sometimes. 00:36:41.681 --> 00:36:42.672 Just a second, Josh. 00:36:42.672 --> 00:36:48.632 Let's back up for a second because, you and I use Pascals for doing diagnostics in the floor. 00:36:48.632 --> 00:36:57.601 And there's a lot of people that will use inches of water column for diagnostics, or they don't do any diagnostics at all, and they just look at the U Tube manometer and they say, that's good enough. 00:36:57.601 --> 00:37:02.161 But 150 pascals would be like three quarters of an inch of water column. 00:37:02.161 --> 00:37:02.762 Right? 00:37:02.762 --> 00:37:07.202 You'd have to apply three quarters of an inch of water column to that spot. 00:37:07.202 --> 00:37:12.992 That's going 150 pascals positive in order to overcome that spike. 00:37:13.291 --> 00:37:13.862 That's right. 00:37:13.862 --> 00:37:20.972 So I've got an active construction system now that is getting overpowered by no mother nature. 00:37:20.972 --> 00:37:22.561 So what part of Mother Nature is it? 00:37:22.561 --> 00:37:35.371 I look at the wind from the local weather the weather stations, and I presented on this quite a few times, but you can, everywhere in the country, you can download the local climate data and you can see hour to hour weather data going back many years. 00:37:35.371 --> 00:37:38.612 As a weather dork, I know all this and I'm looking at it side by side. 00:37:38.612 --> 00:37:42.302 And it's not the wind or the wind direction that seems to be driving this. 00:37:42.302 --> 00:37:51.871 In this particular case, it's the atmospheric pressure and it's not the high pressure or the low pressure, it's when the pressure changes real drastically outside. 00:37:51.871 --> 00:37:55.771 So when storm fronts are rolling through and the barometric pressure is dropping. 00:37:55.771 --> 00:38:01.592 If it drops at a certain rate or worse, the radon will get sucked up by the atmosphere. 00:38:01.592 --> 00:38:17.876 It'll get sucked through the fairly hollow hillside and into these houses and at a clip that I cannot overcome with a three inch pipe, because the most airflow, I'm gonna move that three inch pipe, given the size of the pipe piping system is 60 or 70 CFM. 00:38:17.876 --> 00:38:18.836 Oh, come on, Josh. 00:38:18.836 --> 00:38:21.476 The fans are rated for

250 c fm. 00:38:21.476 --> 00:38:25.407 I know, but there's bottlenecks in these pipes, so I can't move anymore. 00:38:25.407 --> 00:38:33.836 So the solution here, given the criteria of multimillion dollar house, not gonna put a whole bunch of bigger pipes in all over. 00:38:33.836 --> 00:38:40.947 They switched from one three inch stack to two four inch stacks, and then a higher airflow fan. 00:38:40.947 --> 00:38:53.726 And I dropped the spikes from 120 for four to six hours, to now it spikes to maybe 10 picocuries for four to six hours when these super aggressive, low pressure centers roll through. 00:38:53.726 --> 00:38:55.916 But it's only in this correct case. 00:38:55.916 --> 00:39:03.476 I could predict when the radon would get super high without seeing the tape, just by looking at the atmospheric pressure trend over the last three days. 00:39:03.476 --> 00:39:09.442 If it dropped more than four milli bars over six hours, I'm gonna get a super high radon level. 00:39:09.442 --> 00:39:15.742 But if it just gradually drops, four millibars over 12 hours, the radon system can can actually handle that. 00:39:15.742 --> 00:39:21.532 So it's like the, kinda like a tsunami of air coming at that house, or the tsunami of radon coming at that house. 00:39:21.532 --> 00:39:26.032 If it all comes at once, I can't control it, but if it gradually comes, I can. 00:39:26.032 --> 00:39:27.351 But you're not gonna know that. 00:39:27.351 --> 00:39:33.052 Unless you're actually there or have something there to monitor the pressure or the radon all of the time. 00:39:33.351 --> 00:39:34.342 Josh, quick question. 00:39:34.342 --> 00:39:41.211 Going back, does your measurement device also measure barometric pressure and temperature or do you have specific devices for those measurements? 00:39:41.681 --> 00:39:44.231 I don't have specific devices for those measurements. 00:39:44.231 --> 00:39:46.811 Some continuous monitors do measure those things. 00:39:46.811 --> 00:39:52.001 I honestly don't put a lot of, credence in those numbers 'cause I just never double check them. 00:39:52.001 --> 00:39:58.541 And they're measuring atmospheric pressure and temperature in the device, not outside, which is actually more important. 00:39:58.541 --> 00:40:02.501 The temperature difference between inside and outside is more important than the temperature in the basement. 00:40:02.501 --> 00:40:10.452 And likewise they may be measuring atmospheric pressure in inches of mercury, which is a whole different ballgame than actually milli bars. 00:40:10.452 --> 00:40:18.161 Probably a more sophisticated device, which is why we rely on the weather service stuff that actually measured and verified rather than what's coming outta the monitors. 00:40:18.161 --> 00:40:22.152 But even if you were to look at if the monitor, some monitors will track that over time. 00:40:22.152 --> 00:40:24.942 You can see that at a sharp barometric pressure drop. 00:40:24.942 --> 00:40:31.197 If you're had a high airflow situation, you will see sometimes a spike in the amount of radon. 00:40:31.197 --> 00:40:32.882 And it works in inverse as well. 00:40:32.882 --> 00:40:41.461 So when the pressure rises really fast outside, that's the atmosphere, pushing the air back into the hillside and thereby pushing the radon out of the house. 00:40:41.461 --> 00:40:42.811 So you can see that too, 00:40:42.822 --> 00:40:47.681 I think this is interesting because it's something that we don't see very often. 00:40:47.681 --> 00:40:52.541 We don't see the atmospheric pressure spikes because we don't have a lot of available air in the soil. 00:40:52.541 --> 00:40:57.822 Now I always think of this situation where my kids and I were going skiing up in the. 00:40:57.822 --> 00:41:17.411 Colorado Mountains one year, and we're driving up this pass, it goes up to 10,000 feet and there's this chip bag in the back of the car where the kids are sitting and they're like, oh my goodness, this chip bag is going to explode because there's less atmosphere above, above us when we're going up the pass. 00:41:17.411 --> 00:41:20.592 The exact same thing is happening when the atmospheric pressure drops. 00:41:20.592 --> 00:41:25.132 It is going to expand that chip bag, not as much as driving up a mountain pass, right? 00:41:25.132 --> 00:41:28.492 But the air inside the hillside is wanting to expand. 00:41:28.492 --> 00:41:34.072 If the preferential pathway is into the house, where's that air going to go into the house? 00:41:34.077 --> 00:41:34.197 Makes sense. 00:41:34.347 --> 00:41:35.876 To finish a story about the chip bag. 00:41:35.876 --> 00:41:37.677 It did explode in the back of my car. 00:41:37.677 --> 00:41:44.606 I was hoping for chips to go everywhere you know, just like be this big explosion that just kind of popped and it was not very exciting. 00:41:44.606 --> 00:41:45.206 Not as dramatic. 00:41:45.416 --> 00:41:45.867 No. 00:41:45.867 --> 00:41:53.177 But if we took all of the air out of that chip bag before we went over the mountain pass, there just wouldn't be as much air to expand. 00:41:53.177 --> 00:41:59.536 If we had a vacuum sealed bag going over the of the mountain pass, it's not going to expand enough to be super visible. 00:41:59.536 --> 00:42:07.726 And that's what happens where we're at here in the middle of Kansas and most of the plane states, because we're working in really tight soils that don't have a lot of available air. 00:42:07.726 --> 00:42:14.177 We don't see that spike as commonly as you would in Minnesota or somewhere that has glacial Moraine or KARST geology. 00:42:14.527 --> 00:42:17.106 And KARST is actually more prevalent than a lot of people think. 00:42:17.106 --> 00:42:18.547 If you're on a river bluff. 00:42:18.547 --> 00:42:21.666 You're gonna have dissolved bedrock nearby, typically. 00:42:21.666 --> 00:42:24.547 So there are rivers in all of our states. 00:42:24.547 --> 00:42:29.226 We've got somewhere, you're gonna have

higher air flows in small geographic locations. 00:42:29.226 --> 00:42:31.717 It's not completely homogenous everywhere in Kansas. 00:42:31.717 --> 00:42:34.237 But, a lot of Kansas is how Chad described it. 00:42:34.237 --> 00:42:43.536 But you're gonna have glacial Moraine and KARST in a lot of the upper Midwest, basically anything east of the Mississippi and say Tennessee North, you're gonna find a lot of it. 00:42:43.737 --> 00:42:45.086 There's KARST in Alabama. 00:42:45.436 --> 00:42:46.936 The Appalachians as well too. 00:42:46.936 --> 00:42:48.376 It's more prevalent than you think. 00:42:48.806 --> 00:42:56.547 We have KARST, geology in Manhattan Kansas South down through EL Dorado or somewhere in there that's the, what we call the Flint Hills. 00:42:56.547 --> 00:42:57.536 There's KARST there. 00:42:57.536 --> 00:43:02.956 I've worked on the edges of that geology in a different house that we had a well problem in. 00:43:02.956 --> 00:43:06.586 We did have a atmospheric pressure burp of radon into the house. 00:43:06.586 --> 00:43:22.487 But that had 175 foot deep well that went into one of those layers that had some openings in the soil, but typically close to the surface around us in the Flint Hills, there's clay packed into all the limestone in those hills. 00:43:22.487 --> 00:43:28.456 It's still pretty tight soils, but if you go deep enough, you can find some openings even in Kansas. 00:43:28.757 --> 00:43:29.117 Wow. 00:43:29.117 --> 00:43:29.686 That's great. 00:43:29.686 --> 00:43:42.056 We could go on and on about with these stories because they're really interesting and certainly these examples today have been pretty I would assume unique, but still just they're there and something for all of us to be aware of. 00:43:42.056 --> 00:43:46.909 As we close out here guys what would you say one common myth about tough mitigation is? 00:43:46.909 --> 00:43:47.869 What would you say to that? 00:43:48.170 --> 00:43:49.670 I have enough experience. 00:43:49.670 --> 00:43:53.119 I know what I'm doing, but I'm not doing pressure field extension. 00:43:53.119 --> 00:43:55.010 That's a common thing I hear. 00:43:55.010 --> 00:44:00.269 My experience tells me that I don't need to worry about radon on X location, and I ask, WHY? 00:44:00.269 --> 00:44:01.510 verify it. 00:44:01.510 --> 00:44:06.519 Too many contractors are not doing pressure field extension work, and that's really hurting the industry. 00:44:06.519 --> 00:44:15.309 Frankly! If everyone was doing pressure field extension work and understood what the numbers actually mean we would have far fewer system failures. 00:44:15.309 --> 00:44:22.599 We'd have far fewer oversized radon systems, costing millions more dollars to operate than we'd need. 00:44:22.599 --> 00:44:24.280 That's my biggest problem. 00:44:24.480 --> 00:44:30.449 The noise issue associated with larger oversized systems is a big concern. 00:44:30.449 --> 00:44:39.510 When I started, in the radon business, I was talking to a realtor at a house and she had to answer the phone and she said something about 'em here with the radon guy. 00:44:39.510 --> 00:44:43.210 The next thing I hear her say is, yeah, they're loud sometimes, but you get used to it. 00:44:43.210 --> 00:44:49.840 And I'm like, oh, if that's what people think, I'm gonna figure out a way to make sure that we don't have loud systems. 00:44:49.840 --> 00:44:57.295 It's very uncommon in houses that we need radon fan that's loud enough that it's gonna cause problems. 00:44:57.295 --> 00:44:59.175 They shouldn't have to get used to it. 00:44:59.175 --> 00:45:07.625 The common thing that I hear people say is if you still have high radon levels, you just need to move more air, put a bigger fan on and move more air. 00:45:07.625 --> 00:45:17.164 In the case that I talked about at Skipper, would moving more air have helped if it was in a random location or in the suction point that we already had in place? 00:45:17.164 --> 00:45:18.034 Absolutely not. 00:45:18.034 --> 00:45:25.985 And if we would've put a suction point in every corner of that basement and in the patios and in the garage, it would've done absolutely no good. 00:45:25.985 --> 00:45:27.335 Just moving more air. 00:45:27.614 --> 00:45:28.664 Go through what you had to go through. 00:45:28.664 --> 00:45:32.715 And it's, it's not necessarily always easy, you know, from your experience. 00:45:32.715 --> 00:45:40.394 Certainly, you all professionals do have that to draw from, but these examples, sometimes it takes a little extra time and a little extra work. 00:45:40.394 --> 00:45:41.114 It does. 00:45:41.114 --> 00:45:44.445 And the contractors shouldn't be running scared from these things. 00:45:44.445 --> 00:45:47.534 In fact, as a director, maybe you could have some input on this. 00:45:47.534 --> 00:45:52.605 The best experience some a contractor will get is just keeping with these difficult houses. 00:45:52.605 --> 00:45:56.224 And they'll get that experience and it's better than any CE class that they'll ever take. 00:45:56.224 --> 00:46:02.434 So if they can somehow come up with a presentation or paper, maybe you could award some additional CEs from your credentialing body. 00:46:02.434 --> 00:46:17.389 One other thing that I wanna really stress is there's a common misnomer nationwide, worldwide, frankly, where you pop a hole on a foundation and you see what type of soil is there that shall dictate the type of radon fan you use. 00:46:17.389 --> 00:46:18.949 And that is simply untrue. 00:46:18.949 --> 00:46:25.880 Just because Chad runs into clay soils does not mean he uses high suction radon fans. 00:46:25.880 --> 00:46:36.920 High suction radon fans are expensive to start with and they're loud, and just by him sucking harder in the north corner of a basement doesn't mean he's going to get better PFE in the south corner. 00:46:36.920 --> 00:46:49.920 The better way to get PFE in that south corner is a second suction point and using a

smaller radon fan, if that piece of intellect was industry wide, we would be so much better. 00:46:49.920 --> 00:46:57.300 The substrate should not dictate the type of fan you use your numbers from your PFE analysis should dictate that fan you use. 00:46:57.599 --> 00:46:58.135 Great information. 00:46:58.184 --> 00:47:04.485 The thing that i've heard w ay too often people say, I look at my u tube when I'm done putting the radon system in. 00:47:04.485 --> 00:47:10.635 And if it's below a certain amount, then I feel pretty confident that we're gonna fix the radon problem in this house. 00:47:10.635 --> 00:47:14.804 That might be lower just because you have a bunch of pipe above the fan. 00:47:14.804 --> 00:47:19.454 Because if you have resistance above the fan, the differential is going to go down. 00:47:19.454 --> 00:47:23.425 That is not an indicator of success. 00:47:23.425 --> 00:47:35.635 I don't know where people get that idea that, oh, hey, we have to have our U Tube be below 1.8 or 1.5 or something like that with a mid-range fan to have success. 00:47:35.635 --> 00:47:37.114 It's not about that at all. 00:47:37.114 --> 00:47:44.590 Can we measure the pressures in the floor everywhere and do we have negative pressures in the floor relative to inside the house? 00:47:44.590 --> 00:47:46.570 Chad, to wrap up, you live in clay country. 00:47:46.570 --> 00:47:47.769 You work in clay country. 00:47:47.769 --> 00:47:52.360 When was the last time you used a high suction fan in a single family residence? 00:47:52.659 --> 00:47:59.659 I've been in the radon business for over 15 years, and it was probably 12 or 13 years ago, maybe longer than that. 00:47:59.659 --> 00:48:04.900 So the common notion would say that you should be running high suction fans every job, and you simply don't. 00:48:04.900 --> 00:48:05.829 Because you know better. 00:48:05.829 --> 00:48:12.360 And actually, if we have a good preferential pathways in the soil, we use low pressure fans. 00:48:12.710 --> 00:48:15.590 Meaning low flow or low wattage fans. 00:48:15.590 --> 00:48:16.010 Right? 00:48:16.014 --> 00:48:26.934 A low wattage fan, like a RN one Spirit or RP one 40, that we use those 30 to 40% of the time in clay soils. 00:48:27.235 --> 00:48:27.385 Huh. 00:48:27.385 --> 00:48:27.835 Wow. 00:48:27.835 --> 00:48:36.235 Josh, Chad, thank you both for being here and for kicking off this podcast, the stories that are both surprising and really insightful. 00:48:36.235 --> 00:48:46.590 If you wanna carry on this conversation with Chad and Josh, please join us in Fort Worth this year, in October, we will, be meeting for our annual radon and VI symposium. 00:48:46.590 --> 00:48:48.599 Should be a really informative and fun event. 00:48:48.599 --> 00:48:52.260 So check out our website to get more information on that. 00:48:52.260 --> 00:48:57.449 For our listeners, if this episode made you nod your head or laugh a little, don't forget to subscribe. 00:48:57.449 --> 00:49:01.079 Share it with your team and send us your house from Heck Stories. 00:49:01.079 --> 00:49:03.449 We might feature one on a future episode. 00:49:03.449 --> 00:49:05.610 Breathe easy and keep doing the good work. 00:49:05.610 --> 00:49:07.206 Thanks! Take care everyone. 00:49:07.963 --> 00:49:10.780 That’s it for this episode of The Indoor Environment Project. 00:49:10.780 --> 00:49:19.554 If you enjoyed the conversation, learned something new, or just felt seen by the stories—we’d love it if you subscribed, shared this episode with your team, or left us a review. 00:49:19.554 --> 00:49:20.730 Want to go deeper? 00:49:20.730 --> 00:49:26.505 Join the Indoor Environments Association and be part of the movement to improve the spaces we live and the air we breathe. 00:49:26.505 --> 00:49:33.054 Membership gives you access to a national network of pros, discounts, standards, CE courses, and so much more. 00:49:33.054 --> 00:49:35.800 Visit indoorenvironments.org to join today. 00:49:35.800 --> 00:49:44.050 And don’t forget to follow us on social media for updates, insights, and real-world stories from the field—we're on LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook.