Radon Mitigation
A house has one foundation and one owner. A commercial or multi-family building has several of each. Testing follows a different protocol, with placements set by ground-contact area rather than by which room feels lived-in, and mitigation has to work alongside ventilation equipment that is already moving a lot of air — sometimes in the wrong direction. In the Twin Cities that also means heating plants running hard for half the year. We plan the reporting for managers, boards and tenants at the start rather than translating a homeowner report afterwards.
Offices, schools, apartment buildings and mixed-use blocks are tested differently from houses. Placements are set by ground-contact floor area and by how the building is divided — separate slabs, separate air-handling zones, separate occupied areas — rather than by one monitor in the lowest room. The result is almost always more placements than owners expect, and skimping on them is how a building gets a comfortable average while one wing reads high.
Commercial buildings move a lot of air mechanically. Depending on how the system is balanced, it can pressurize the building and push soil gas back, or put the lower floors under negative pressure and pull it in. In the Twin Cities heating plants and makeup air run hard from October to April, which is exactly when results tend to be worst. Mitigation designs here are built alongside the mechanical system, and we coordinate with whoever maintains it.
In apartment and condo buildings the priority is ground-contact and lower-level units, because they sit against the soil. Upper floors are lower risk but not automatically clear, particularly where stairwells, elevator shafts and utility chases run straight down to the basement. Converted older buildings in Minneapolis and St. Paul, with stone or brick foundations, often need more sealing work than newer construction.
Testing is quiet and unobtrusive. Installation means core drilling and pipe runs, which are noisy, so the work is scheduled around the building — evenings, weekends or unit by unit. That is agreed before the quote, along with access, notices and who needs to sign off.
A building has more people who need the result: owners, managers, boards, tenants and sometimes lenders. We plan the reporting for them from the start, with placement maps and post-commissioning retests, rather than handing over a homeowner report. Where individual units or small buildings are involved, the residential protocol still applies.
How long does it take? Depends entirely on ground-floor area and how many suction fields the slab turns out to need. Scoping is its own visit, and we say so rather than quoting blind.
These usually come up in the same conversation:
A continuous monitor in the lowest lived-in level for at least 48 hours, logging every hour — a curve you can read, not one number that might be a fluke.
Learn More →The standard fix for a Twin Cities basement or slab: suction under the floor, the gaps sealed, a fan outside the living space and a discharge above the roof — built for a Minnesota winter.
Learn More →A second test once the system has been running. Included with every install, and available on its own for a system nobody has checked.
Learn More →Free · No Obligation
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