Radon Mitigation in Manchester, NH

Reviewed by Chris Pagliccia, co-owner, 603 Basement Solutions.

Radon is a gas that comes up out of the ground and into the house sitting on it. You can’t see it or smell it. A test is the only thing that tells you whether your Manchester house has a problem.

Call 603-610-1770Get a free inspection

Test before you buy anything

If you haven’t tested, don’t buy a system. Test first.

We charge $50 for a radon test, and if the number comes back high and you have us do the work, that $50 comes off the job. Nobody here will quote you a mitigation system off a hunch about your street. A lab report is the only good reason to spend money on this, and it’s the cheapest part of the whole thing.

The EPA says fix a house that reads 4 pCi/L or higher. That’s the number your report gets measured against, and it’s the number that decides whether we’re having this conversation at all.

Run the test with the house closed up. Nobody in Manchester leaves a window open in January, and shut tight is exactly the condition a radon test is meant to be run in. A July reading and a January reading on the same house often don’t match.

A dry basement tells you nothing about radon

Radon comes up through the floor from the soil underneath it, and it goes wherever the pressure lets it. Water gets in a different way and gets fixed a different way.

So a bone dry basement can test high. A damp one two streets over can test low. Two houses on the same block can come back with very different numbers, and neither basement told anybody anything before the test did.

If you’ve got water and radon both, we’ll tell you which one to do first and why.

Two-families, triple deckers, and who decides

Only about a third of the housing in Manchester is a detached single family house. The rest is two-families, triple deckers and converted blocks. So on a lot of jobs here the first thing to sort out is who’s making the decision.

If you rent, you can test your own unit. The test is yours to run and the result is yours to keep. Paying for the fix belongs to whoever owns the building, and we’re happy to be the ones who explain it to them. We’ve made that call plenty of times and it usually goes fine.

If you own the building, the foundation under it decides how much work this is. Some buildings take one system. Some take more. We look at the actual basement before we put a number on it, because guessing at that from the curb is how a homeowner ends up with a surprise.

What a sub-slab system actually is

We core a hole through the concrete floor, dig out a pocket in the stone underneath, glue a PVC pipe into that hole, run the pipe up and out of the house, and put a fan on it.

The fan holds the space under your slab at a lower pressure than the room you’re standing in. Soil gas takes the easy way out, which is now the pipe, so it never gets into the house. We seal the obvious cracks and the sump lid while we’re at it, so the fan isn’t wasting its pull on holes we could have closed.

That pipe running up the outside wall past the gutter is doing one job. It carries the air from under your floor up above the roofline and lets it go where it disperses. It’s got nothing to do with your heat, your plumbing or your dryer, and it isn’t venting the inside of your house.

A slab house with no basement gets a system too. There’s just less room to be clever about where the pipe goes, and that’s a design conversation rather than an automatic upcharge. If part of the house sits over a dirt crawl space, we run a sub-membrane system under a sealed liner down there. Same idea, different floor.

Maintenance is close to nothing. The fan runs all the time and it’s meant to. There’s a small gauge on the pipe with colored liquid in it, and if both sides of that liquid sit level, the fan has quit and you should call us. Glance at it now and then. That’s it.

What radon mitigation costs in Manchester

$900 to $6,000, and most homes land between $1,950 and $2,250.

What moves you up that range is how many suction points the slab needs, how far the pipe has to travel to get above the roof, and whether we’re working over concrete or a dirt crawl. A finished basement adds routing work, because now the pipe has to get where it’s going without wrecking a ceiling you paid for. The test is $50 and it comes off the job if you go ahead.

The system carries a 10-year warranty on its integrity and its components. A guarantee about a specific number on your next test is a separate thing, and it only counts if we’ve put it in writing for your house.

After the fan is running

Re-test. That part is on you, not on us. We don’t do the follow up test, so buy a kit or hire a tester, run it, and keep the result with your house papers.

It’s the only proof the system did what it was installed to do. And when you sell, that piece of paper answers the buyer’s question before they ask it.

Who’s allowed to do this work in New Hampshire

Not everybody. New Hampshire requires a certified installer to design and install a radon mitigation system, so this is not a handyman job or a weekend project here. 603 is certified, radon certification RMS-113966, licensed and insured.

Manchester keeps our phones busier than any town on our board. We’re in these buildings constantly, so we walk into a triple decker with a fair idea of what the basement looks like before anybody opens the door.

And if your test comes back low, we’ll tell you to keep your money. There’s no system worth buying for a number that doesn’t need one. If you want the testing side first, start with radon level testing. There’s more on the systems themselves on our radon mitigation page, and the cost detail lives in what a radon system costs. If water is the other half of your problem, we also do basement waterproofing and crawl space encapsulation in Manchester.

Work we have done nearby

Radon systems vent above the roofline. That is what the pipe outside is for. These are different houses, not one job photographed start to finish.

Frequently asked questions

What a radon customer said

We had 603 basement solutions install a radon mitigation system in our already finished basement. Justin came out to take a look at the space and he explained everything and answered any questions that we had. He then came back with Branden and they did the installation together. They even were willing to take a look at something unrelated to what they were doing with the radon mitigation which was so appreciated. Both were awesome and so professional. And our radon levels are already down not even 24 hours later. Thanks again!

Elise Cormier, 5 stars, Google review

Sources

EPA action level, 4 pCi/L: US EPA, What is EPA’s Action Level for Radon. Housing unit mix (about a third of Manchester housing is single-unit detached): US Census ACS 2023 5-year, table B25024. Prices, the $50 test credit, the 10-year system warranty, the certified-installer requirement in New Hampshire, the radon certification number and the Manchester call volume are 603’s own records.