Edit: E.g. the numbers from this site suggest, for 15 out of the 16 listed fan models, the lifetime electricity cost is likely to be significantly larger than the install cost unless you are already much older at the time you start using the system or you have extremely cheap electricity (or both) https://www.radonaway.com/radon-fan-operating-cost-calculato...
For the cost, preventing cancer seems like it's a wise investment. I say this as a cancer survivor.
I think it's a mistake to conflate an infinite number of hypothetical risks with a definite and known risk. It leads to analysis paralysis and FUD. It is not possible to know what, among all of the infinite hypothetical options, is the best to reduce your mortality. So let's focus on the concrete steps we can take and that we do know are effective.
For most people, that is not radon mitigation, because most people don't have a radon problem. If you find out that it is a problem for you, and you have the cash to solve it - just solve it. It's that simple.
Enjoy one free beer a month, dude. Chances are you won’t develop a vicious cancer.
If in 20 years I find out I got ripped off, I won't really be upset about it.
Literally, the CDC only mentions two primary sources of lung cancer: smoking and radon. Unless you have an unusual, alternative risk factor, it's practically correct to say eliminating smoking and radon prevent lung cancer.
We pay to live further from the toxic waste dump, the motorway or the pylons. We want filtered water. We want clean air. We pay to have nicer, less risky things.
If you own a home in such a locale, you might as well do any mitigation while living in the house. Otherwise you're not getting any cancer risk reduction for your dollars but you'll still pay those same dollars for the mitigation when you sell the house.
Of course that's median, most people on HN... probably should just get the system if the Radon levels are high.
For the other 7% that then need to really do a cost-benefit the data is out there but you do need to go through your specific circumstances to get a meaningful number. The risk levels vary vastly (orders of magnitudes) between both the radon level and your life choices/situation, so it's relatively meaningless to share individual cost-benefit analyses.
Spend $15 or $100 for one or two measurements, *then* worry about cost to mitigate.
- high base humidity of the place (e.g. the city where I live has a yearly avg. humidity of 70%, but specific to my apartment and ignoring the dry seasons over 80% is the norm (also for context not tropical but central EU, it's stuff like 20C+85% humidity). So airing out your room might increase air humidity...
- in small apartments it's the quite often norm that the side effect of taking a show can temporary rise humidity quite a bit, even if you ventilate properly. Most bathrooms in small appartments are just not well designed wrt. this (context I'm not speaking about long hot showers, but short normal warm showers).
- in small bed rooms night sweat can rise humidity by quite a lot, mostly if you are slightly sick but anyway
- just basic flowers can raise humidity, too
excluding dry areas IMHO for most no large apartments the landlord has forsaken any right to claim it's your fault if they don't provide reasonable measurements against humidity (even if it's just a half way decent (noise wise) air humidifier. Reason: Just standard normal expected usage will cause to high humidity level even if you do air out the apartment twice a day (which depending on weather conditions you might not even be able to do)
Sadly that isn't necessary the local laws/regulations POV.
https://www.epa.gov/radon/what-epas-action-level-radon-and-w...
The EPA doesn’t make such creative claims. But the sites that do will also conveniently sell you stuff.
https://radonbegone.com/what-does-your-radon-number-mean/
https://www.nationalradondefense.com/radon-information/radon...
These websites will try to tell you that the average indoor radon level is equivalent to 2.5 cigarettes per day or 66 chest X-rays per year. The EPA doesn’t make that claim though.
Here in Maine about 36.5% of radon test results equal or exceed the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) action level of 4 pCi/L, according to the Lung Association’s “State of Lung Cancer” report.
If you own a basement in Maine, you should probably test it!
The biggest risk of smoking one cigarette a day is not that it will give you cancer, it's that it will give you nicotine addiction which will lead to smoking twenty a day and getting cancer. Radon exposure doesn't have that effect.
there are quite many things made much more likely with smoking which would end very deadly but modern medicine has learned to to move into the non deadly if treated in time area, which doesn't mean it it doesn't leaves you with long lasting side effects...
like most cases in my environment of smokers having "likely smoking caused" issues fall under that category (so far, aging/time tends to let you see more death in your environment and I'm not yet that old)
Smoking for 40 years that would be 5 months at 1 a day or 17 years at 40 a day.
I think that's all consistent with what you said: 2 packs a day and you usually, but by no means always, don't make it to retirement at ~66. Five months is enough that I'd take some care to avoid it, though.
[0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1117323/
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/dec/30/single-cigar...
to some degree that is exactly the thing
by smoking you add a risk
and the more ways you add risk through your live the more likely you will die an early death
it's just basic statistics
and for the same reason you will find someone who does add all the risks but somehow still dies with 90+, if your sample size is large enough and factors complicated enough you are pretty much guaranteed to find some pretty big outliers
but realistically speaking it a pretty bad idea to assume you are such an outlier, but many people tend to ("basically") do exactly that (due to an combination of subconsciously avoiding reality and simply not thinking things through)
yes
1. it's very affordable to fix
2. long term exposure always adds a non negligible risk
so just fix it
I'm confused why people get hung up on a cost-benefit analysis which is pretty much always guaranteed to be a net positive. Either slightly or majorly.
And if it's a rented apartment in many countries you can force your land lord to fix it with a wide arsenal of funny things you can do if they try to refuse :shrug:
The reason they will not all say it's worth it is because there is nothing "magical" that happens at 4.0 pCi/L. Whether that is the sensible threshold vs doing something else with your money is a very different answer for a non smoker who makes 35k/y vs a smoker who makes 250k/y.
You'll never know. The same way people in the exclusion zone will never know if their thyroid cancer was always destined to be or if it really was related to the Chernobyl meltdown.
But spending (closer to $1000) to mitigate some risk from a known threat vector does seem thrifty.
No, there are a lot of known threat vectors.
https://www.epa.gov/radon/health-risk-radon
Scroll down to "Radon Risk If You Have Never Smoked". Looks pretty worthwhile to take it from "very high" to "almost nil". If "very high" was in the range of the 2nd highest level listed here, that's 2% chance. That's for lifetime exposure but there's also multiple people living in the house.
If you DO smoke, the numbers look VERY good for spending some cash to get rid of radon. (Of course you should also stop smoking.)
But if your results come back much closer to normal background levels, there’s not much you can do. Even the EPA says it’s difficult to get it below 2.
Meanwhile, lots of websites out there try to scare you into buying remediation for low values (see comment below).
It’s the perfect bogeyman. Radon. Cancer. Invisible silent killer. And I think it’s demonstrated by the vibe-based “seems like a good idea” conclusions in these comments.
A perspective perhaps different from yours: Avoidable cancer risk isn't great, and smart people* properly weighing the facts have repeatedly judged the value of radon mitigation to exceed the costs.
* - Probabilistically speaking, this includes many who are smarter than you and me
Since around 2000, it's been part of building regulations that you gotta build air-gapped foundations in family homes. Those who can measure radon gas are adviced to buy things to fight it, and you can reduce it to basically 0% for little money.
I never really considered it from an advertisement perspective as it's adviced by our government and non-profit NGO's. So there is that, if that helps you.
which is why I'm confused by people second questioning how bad it actually is in context of _fixing_ it (not in context of a national health scope)
if there is something which is known to be quite unhealthy in a non small degree, and there is a cheap fix why wouldn't you just fix it. In the end if it's very bad, or slightly less bad or the 10th leading cause instead or whatever doesn't matter, fixing it is affordable and it's guaranteed dangerous on long term exposure so you do it.
In my state, the state forces some of these tests (e.g., smoke detector) as part of the sales process so at least there is some hook for testing.
I'm not saying it's not worth it -- that's the point, I don't know -- but I agree with people upthread that it would be nice to have better information with which to make decisions.
Question: Where does radon related mortality rank versus other mortality factors in the United States?
<AI "reasons" a bit>
...
Summary: Radon in perspective
Category / Cause Approx. Deaths per Year (U.S.) Rank / Context
Heart disease ~680,000 #1 overall cause of death
Cancer (all causes) ~613,000 #2 overall cause
Chronic lower respiratory disease ~145,000 #5 overall (includes COPD, etc.)
Lung cancer due to radon ~20,000–21,000
Subset of cancer deaths; about 3–4%
Toxic agents (inc. radon, pollutants) ~55,000 ~2.3% of all deaths (includes radon part)
So AI says it's a bit less than 1% of preventable deaths (or something) annually. Probably puts it in the top 150 causes or so. What you want to do with that hypothesis, or whether you want to spend time sanity checking it, is up to you. Hitting the gym to avoid heart disease is like 35 times more important. A radon home testing kit to eliminate uncertainty about this particular <1% risk is a one time cheap thing though.
I wish more people thought like this. Every time I go to the GP I want to get a printout of my mortality pie based on everything they know about me.
What slice of my mortality pie was radon before and after spending $5000? Could I spend $5000 to cut a bigger slice out of it in another way, like eating better or hiring a grizzly bear to make me exercise more often?
I think action is better than decision paralysis, but I wish I could make much more informed decisions.