Radon Mitigation in Draper, UT

Houses Built Into the Slope

Draper climbs. From the valley floor at about 4,500 feet up onto the Traverse Mountains and the benches below Corner Canyon, a great many of the lots here are graded rather than flat, and the houses on them are daylight-basement designs — finished lower level open to the garden on the downhill side, buried against the hill on the uphill side. That geometry matters for soil gas. A flat-lot house has soil contact underneath. A cut-in house has soil contact underneath and against a wall that may be a full storey high, which is a second route in that a single under-slab pipe will not necessarily reach.

Bench Gravel Over Bedrock

The ground here is the same story as the rest of the east side — permeable fan and shoreline material shed off uranium-bearing rock in the range — but with an extra wrinkle. On the higher benches the depth to competent rock is often shallow, and a slab poured close to ledge behaves differently from one over deep gravel. Sometimes the rock is fractured and conducts gas efficiently along joints; sometimes it caps the soil and everything moves sideways instead. Neither is predictable from the street, so it is measured.

New Enough to Have a Stub

A lot of Draper went up after passive radon rough-ins became common practice, which means a fair number of houses already have a capped pipe running from under the slab up through the roof. Where that exists and was done properly, converting it to an active system is a fraction of the work of starting from nothing — an inline fan, a gauge, sealing, and a test to prove the result. Where it exists and was done badly, it is worth knowing that before anyone relies on it.

Two Foundations, One House

Step-down foundations are common on these slopes: the garage slab at one level, the living space at another, sometimes a third pad for a bonus room over the garage. Each pour is its own sub-slab area with its own gravel, or lack of it, and they are frequently not connected. A system that treats the main slab and ignores the stepped section leaves a third of the floor plan untreated, and the only way to know is to test the communication between them first.

Coverage Around Draper

Draper proper, the Corner Canyon and SunCrest benches, and the newer development spreading east toward the Traverse ridgeline. Twenty-five to thirty minutes from downtown Salt Lake. Everything starts with a measurement and any system finishes with a second one.

Draper Radon FAQs