Indoor Air Quality
Eight questions, about a minute. This tool tells you how urgently your Alberta home should be tested for radon — and it is honest about the one thing it cannot do, which is tell you your actual level. Only a test does that.
Radon is a colourless, odourless radioactive gas that seeps out of the ground and accumulates indoors. According to the Canadian Cancer Society it is the second leading cause of lung cancer after smoking, and the leading cause among people who have never smoked. You cannot see it, smell it or taste it, and the only way to find it is to measure it.
Answer honestly — nothing is sent anywhere. This runs entirely in your browser.
Radon is measured in becquerels per cubic metre (Bq/m³). Health Canada set the residential guideline at 200 Bq/m³ in 2007.
Mitigation should bring the level as low as reasonably achievable, not merely under the line.
Health Canada's 2012 Cross-Canada Survey put roughly 7% of Alberta homes above the guideline. Later work by University of Calgary researchers through the Evict Radon national study found 12.4% — about one in eight — above guideline in its initial study area, and some individual Alberta communities have tested with more than half of homes above the line.
The finding most worth knowing, and the one that surprises people, is about age. The Calgary research found homes built in the previous 25 years averaged 31.5% higher radon than homes built before 1992. Modern construction is tighter and better sealed, which is excellent for heating bills and unhelpful for soil gas — what gets in has fewer ways back out.
That matters locally. A great deal of the housing in Spruce Grove, Stony Plain and the newer edges of Edmonton went up well inside that window.
The other consistent finding is that radon does not follow neighbourhood boundaries. Two houses on the same street, built by the same builder in the same year, can test very differently depending on what the soil and foundation are doing underneath them. That is precisely why no map, model or questionnaire — including this one — substitutes for measuring your own home.
Use a long-term test of at least 90 days, ideally spanning part of the heating season when the house is shut up. Short-term tests bounce around too much with weather, ventilation and daily activity to base a decision on.
Place the detector in the lowest level you regularly occupy, at breathing height, away from drafts, exterior walls and windows. Test kits are inexpensive, and many Alberta libraries lend digital radon monitors free of charge — worth checking yours before buying anything.
We don't test or mitigate radon — that's a C-NRPP job. What we do is indoor air quality assessment, and furnace, duct and dryer vent cleaning across the Edmonton area.
Radon mitigation is a specialised trade. The standard fix is a sub-slab depressurisation system — a pipe and fan that draws soil gas from beneath the foundation and vents it above the roofline before it can enter the house. Properly installed, it typically cuts levels by 80–90% or more.
Use a C-NRPP certified radon professional. That is the Canadian certification programme for radon measurement and mitigation, and it is the credential to ask for.
To be plain about our own limits: we do not test for radon and we do not mitigate it. We clean furnaces, ducts and dryer vents, and no amount of duct cleaning affects a radon level — radon comes through the foundation, not the ductwork. If anyone offers to solve a radon problem by cleaning your ducts, that is a reason to end the conversation.