Radon Mitigation
Radon fans are consumables. They run continuously for years and then they stop, and because nothing else in the house changes when they do, almost nobody notices. The gauge on the pipe exists precisely so you can — two columns of fluid at the same level means the fan is not pulling. Beyond dead fans, we see systems that were undersized for the material under the slab, systems whose suction point was cut off by a later addition, and discharges terminated somewhere they should not be. In every case we test before we quote, because the reading tells you what is actually wrong.
A radon fan is a consumable part running continuously for years, and when one reaches the end of its life it does not announce it. It simply stops, or it keeps spinning while moving far less air than it used to. The house goes back toward its original reading over the following days and nothing visible changes — no alarm, no smell, no mark on the wall. If your system has a manometer and the two columns of fluid have levelled out, that is the fan telling you it has stopped. Most people have never been told what the gauge is for.
Beyond a dead fan, the recurring faults are predictable. Seals age and part company with the concrete, particularly on the slab–wall joint where the ground has been working at it. A sump lid gets lifted to service the pump and never properly reseated. A basement gets finished, or an extension goes on, and the new slab is simply not connected to the system that was sized for the old one. A roofer shortens or reroutes a discharge. A pipe run through an unheated space sags at a joint and collects condensate until it is effectively blocked.
We see a reasonable number of systems that were never going to work: a single suction point on tight west-side silt where the pressure field was never going to travel, a discharge terminating below a roofline or beside an opening window, no sealing done at all, or a fan mounted inside the conditioned envelope where any leak in the positive-pressure side is discharging soil gas into the house rather than above it. That last one is worth checking on any system you did not watch being installed.
Replacing the fan is the obvious move and it is frequently the wrong first one. If the original pressure field never covered the floor plate, a new fan will reproduce the original failure at the original price. So the visit starts with measurement: what the system is achieving under the slab now, whether that reaches the extremities, and whether the ground it is pulling against matches what the design assumed. Then the parts conversation is about a defined problem.
With a reading. Any repair here finishes with a post-repair test, because the entire lesson of a failed system is that hardware which looks right proves nothing. If the system turns out to be beyond economic repair, replacing it is a mitigation job and gets priced as one rather than accumulating as a series of parts.
How long does it take? A straight fan replacement is a short visit. Anything that turns out to be a design problem rather than a worn part is priced as the work it actually is.
These usually come up in the same conversation:
A second test after the system has been running. Included with every install, and available on its own for a system nobody has ever checked.
Learn More →The standard fix for a Salt Lake basement or slab-on-grade: suction under the floor, every gap sealed, a fan and a sealed riser to above the roofline — then a retest to prove it worked.
Learn More →A continuous monitor in the lowest lived-in level for 48 hours, logging hourly — so you get a curve you can read, not one number that might have been a fluke.
Learn More →Free · No Obligation
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