When it comes to taking care of your home, it is important to regularly assess the safety of your home, often through a sump pump installation contractor when it comes to the presence of radon. Far too little people know about the dangers of radon, but a sump pump installation contractor can educate you and your family and help you to understand these dangers as well as how to assess the level of danger in your own home. As any sump pump installation contractor will know, it can be a difficult thing to discover that your home is not as safe as you though it was. After all, home is the place that is supposed to be the safest of all, the place we go to get away from the dangers of the outside world. And your home can be safe once again after a radon mitigation and abatement service is contacted.
Radon, if you are unaware, is a colorless and odorless gas that can be found in many homes throughout the United States, often generated from your sump pump (and therefore why it is important to hire an experience sump pump installation contractor). In fact, statistics show that at least one in every fifteen homes in the United States has detectable radon levels that are above what the EPA (the Environmental Protection Agency) determines to be dangerous levels of radon. For those living on an Indian Reservation, the risk of radon in the home is even higher, with one out of every three homes found with these levels of radon easily detectable. To put things into perspective, a family living in a home with these levels of radon are being exposed to up to thirty five times as much radiation than they would if they lived directly next to a nuclear waste site. This is an astonishingly high level of radiation, and can have a number of serious health consequences in cases of prolonged exposure.
Unfortunately, serious medical complications like lung cancer have been found to be directly caused by radon exposure. It is already the second leading cause of lung cancer in the United States alone and leads to as many as twenty thousand lunch cancer related deaths in just one year. The longer you live with radon exposure, the more likely you are of developing lung cancer. In many lung cancer cases, treatment options are narrow. This is due to the fact that the majority of cases of lung cancer are only diagnosed after the cancer has spread significantly, making it much more difficult to treat and ultimately eradicate, meaning that many lung cancer patients will live with lung cancer for the rest of their lives.
To reduce your risk of developing lung cancer from radon exposure, you should contact a residential radon testing service. Residential radon testing services will conduct one of two tests (and perhaps both, if the situation warrants it). A short term radon test will test for radon during the span of two to ninety days, while a long term test will test radon levels of exposure past the ninety day mark. If radon is found to be in high levels in your home, radon mitigation services can be performed. You should also contact a sump pump installation contractor to prevent your radon levels from rising again once they have been lowered. Studies have shown that if we were to lower the radon levels in homes across the United States, lung cancer deaths caused by radon exposure would drop by as much as four percent, meaning that as many as five thousand lives could be saved, even through systems of passive mitigation (for example, installing a radon fan in your home).