Boston condos for sale: What’s colorless, odorless and kills 23,000 people a year?
What’s invisible, odorless, creeps in your basement, and kills 21,000 people a year in the US alone according to the EPA?
The answer is radon gas, and to be more specific, it comes from naturally occurring uranium in the rocks and soil underneath homes, including garden level condos in the Boston area.
Be cautious of Boston garden level Units
Here’s what you need to know: Radon gas entering your home – or a Boston garden level condos for sale you’re thinking of buying – is a serious concern, but it is easy to test and relatively easy to mitigate if detected.
Radon testing
Most home inspectors will encourage testing for Boston garden level condos and will test a home for radon as part of their inspection, but this is just to protect home buyers. If you’re a homeowner, you should test your home for radon now if it hasn’t been done in the last few years. That’s because radon tests themselves can take some time, and you’ll definitely want to deal with the problem if the test comes back with higher than the accepted safe level of radon in your home.
How does the radon level in the average Boston home compare to the rest of the country? Technically speaking, each home is different – a high-radon-tested home can be next to one with no radon detected at all.
What do you do if your Boston home doesn’t pass the radon test?
What do you do if your Boston Beacon Hill town-home doesn’t pass the radon test? Several fixes (usually called mitigation solutions) are available, but one thing to check is your basement or crawlspace’s vents. Many homeowners block or cover these to improve heating efficiency, but they in doing so you may be inadvertently trapping radon that would otherwise escape harmlessly into the atmosphere.
If your home still has higher-than-acceptable radon levels, it’s important to arrange for mitigation by a professional right away. Not only is your health at risk, but your home value will suffer. Because radon gas can enter your home through gaps around service pipes, cracks in the floor and even construction joints, mitigation focuses on venting the radon from its source underneath the house, to somewhere away from doors or windows. In the Boston area, a contractor will charge anywhere from $1,000 to $6,000 for radon mitigation, depending on how the gas is getting in.
If your Boston home does need this kind of work, be sure to use a certified radon mitigation contractor.
The good news is, if your home was built with a radon barrier or had a mitigation system installed after construction, you have an advantage in the Boston real estate market! Knowing that they’re safe from this toxic basement creeper will give home buyers another reason to love your home
