Yeah, this is the correct heuristic.

Spend $15 or $100 for one or two measurements, *then* worry about cost to mitigate.

Advice also applies to mold. A lot of people worry about mold in their house. It's actually quite straightforward to determine if this is actually a problem: Home Depot sells "test kits" for a few bucks that are essentially petri dishes. Buy two of these, put one inside where you are worried and then the other outside and wait 3-4 days. If they look radically different, then send the inside one in for actual analysis, which is an additional ~$40 USD. Then and only then do you need to action and by that point you know exactly what the problem is so you don't have to pay some "expert" to sell you some massively expensive mitigation strategy that you probably don't need.

Is it common to have an invisible mould problem? Lots of people are in the situation where there is really visible mould but the problem is getting their landlord to fix it, without getting into allegations over drying clothes inside etc.

honesty depending where you are such allegations might be very baseless & meaningless for many reasons like

- 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.

I would expect that mold can build up ie in ventilation where it remains unseen unless it literally clogs he whole system. You can't see the spores an often there is no strong foul smell.

There's a lot of fear over things like black mold in the states. It's extremely rare but it can be life threatening, and it's one of those things that people see and get nervous about when they see that for instance their HVAC vent has mold spots, that they are breathing toxic air. 9 times out of 10, it's totally fine. This method mentioned above gives homeowners the peace of mind that they aren't poisoning their families accidentally for an extremely affordable price. The alternative of calling mold remediation experts in is going to be extremely pricey, and those people cannot be trusted to be upfront on whether your mold problem is 1. actually a problem and 2. actually dangerous - because they make money on selling expensive remediation solutions.

Our local library system offers these to borrow for six-week spans (or whatever the length of the testing is). It’s a one-and-done deal and you’re good for as long as you stay in your home. Batteries included.

The EPA recommends home owners mitigate with radon levels of 4 pCi/L and above, and the EPA recommends home owners mitigate ”consider” mitigation at levels 2-4. Often you will see people post radon results in the 10+ or even 50+ range, which may lead you to think 4 pCi/L is not too bad, but in fact exposure to that level is the equivalent of 8 cigarettes a day or 200 chest X-rays/year.

Given the average level of radon in the air outdoors is 10% of that, being outdoors is 20 chest x-rays per year, eh? That’s almost a cigarette per day being outdoors!

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...

The indoor level of radon isn't going to be lower than outdoors. Indoors is either the same or higher than outdoors. Your level of exposure to radon will not go up by going outside. That's your background exposure level, and is already baked into the calculation of how much an effect an elevated exposure to radon in your home will have on you. Radon is a serious thing to consider, especially if your home has a basement. Radon mitigation is not a scam conspiracy.

Like any good scam, they take a legitimate issue for few and sell it to many who don’t need it.

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.

It’s very region specific. Just like some regions don’t have many basements, some have a lot of radon:

  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.

https://www.lung.org/media/press-releases/maine-radon-2024

If you own a basement in Maine, you should probably test it!

One cigarette a day doesn't sound that bad for you. 40-a-day smokers exist and while they're unhealthy, they're not universally dying in their fifties, so one fortieth of that effect seems small.

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.

Cancer isn’t the only risk though, the 100 other things are pretty bad too. It isn’t ‘just’ that you might die of cancer, it’s the decades of leg ulcers, stroke, heart and lung disease etc.

yes cancer is only one of the more deadly and more reliably attributable to cigarettes things

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)

Those are some powerful claims, do you have any links for that? Generally 2-pack smokers that started early ie in their 20s or even earlier don't live till retirement where I live, but I agree its a small sample and generally such people don't live a healthy life overall.

A couple of sources putting the life expectancy cost at 10-20 minutes per cigarette.

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...

> people don't live a healthy life overall.

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)

The EPA already publishes the direct risk levels for a given pCi/L reading. Adding an intermediate step of how many cigarettes per day that is akin to is not giving you any new information (but is likely distracting you from just thinking about the risk level itself).

Saw someone built his own DIY radon fan system. Think it was a clip from Swedish public service tv. He built it using 12V fans from server racks. Guess that is an option as well.

Why? Purpose built radon fans are not expensive and at most you have some pvc and fans.

> so it's relatively meaningless to share individual cost-benefit analyses.

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:

What you quoted doesn't really agree with what you're stating, which is really "it's meaningful to share the cost-benefit analyses because they'll all say it's worth it".

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.

Has anyone ever done a meaningful cost benefit analysis for less than $15?

This is bang on why you're best off to just always start by paying the $15 to do the test and then let that drive whether there will actually be a need to cost-benefit analysis around mitigation costs.