Anyone bought in a high Radon area?

[homebythesea]

Searches on our potential new house reveal it's in a high Radon area. Having done some research and looked at the maps of such areas it looks like vast swathes of properties across the land are in Radon areas. I'm thinking it's a risk worth taking - would be interested to know if anyone else has come to the same conclusion or whether you did further testing before you purchased?

I had no clue that most of the SW is affected, when looking and offfering on a place. Only during the searches this came up. How high is yours? mine is in 1-3% bracket, but most of Cornwall is something like 8-10 (shock)! I'm not at all pleased about it but I have phoned the agency and asked a few questions and really had to buy anyway. You can't test before you buy in any case - that's hte issue. It takes 3 months as they explained (the test is quite cheap and you order the kit by mail) - you have to place thedevice in your house and itwill test over time, a lot dpends how the place in ventilated. I think I'd be more concerned with a house (being lower to the fround) than a flat with two floors below, though it travels through floors/walls anyway, but I assume less concentrated. Then if it tests positive you have to spend about a thousand pounds to install vents into the floor which will reduce hte levels. Your particular house can be in a low spot (say 8% chance if it's high if that's hte grid) even though the area is high on the map.

I suppose you can test in advance if you aer in a long chain, but you still can't do this with every house you ar interested in, can you!

Our whole town is a high radon area, doesn't seem to put anyone off. It is something to do with the limestone I am lead to believe. Certainly didn't put us off.

yes, but statistically lung cancer is higher in bery high radon areas like cornwall! so it might not be noticeable but harmful (very bad if people are smokers).

Re Radon exposure - I found this factoid:

*For a non-smoker, the risk of death from lung cancer at 75 years is
0.4% for the typical background radon concentration. At 10x greater
concentration - something that happens in only 0.4% of homes in the UK

• the risk increases to 0.5%.*

As a non-smoker I am frankly willling to take this miniscule risk given that every time I get in my car my risk of death is way higher. As you say, you can't in practical terms test before you buy so while we might get a testing kit in the fullness of time it won't hold up our purchase, and we'll deal with whatever the consequences are later.

WTF is radon and how do you know if you live in a high radon area or not??? ive never heard of it?!!

Radon info.

We are in a 5-10% area, which we did talk about before we bought the house, but looking online, the area where I grew up is a 10-30% area so I don't know why we were worried really!

Radon remediation is very easy, and its only really a problem in basements anyway. Just a case of making sure its well ventilated.

If you were concerned, you just get the kit to monitor and take it from there.

CMOT, so is it the case that radon doesn't travel up to higher floors - I think it does via inside walls as I've been told, but maybe they were inaccurate, is it a fact that it doesn't reach higher floors?

it does cost about a thousand though to install the vents if needed, I think it reduces it but not completely remedies - andyou can't ventilate enough naturally in colder weather. But what choice do we have in the SW anyway..it's nice in many other ways!

I lived in Cornwall and, after I lost my home when a mineshaft collapsed in the back garden (old and very long story), I was told by the geotechnical engineers brought in to advise about remedial works (total cost £1.2million ) that in order for radon to pose any health risk, you would have to live in a house with no ventilation - no windows or doors open - for around 30 years!

So, no worries there!

broad, well in this case are they jusy making money on this, scaring the public?? not too nice of them, is it.

were there many lung cancer cases you knew of, in you area of Cornwall?

I grew up there and know no-one who died of lung cancer. My parents had one of the vent things fitted about 5 years ago.