Airthings Corentium Home Radon Detector

There are infinite things in life that are beyond my control. There are also infinite things, I guess, that are within my control. Anyway, control is a big deal. This summer, I’ll become a dad for the first time, and increasingly I seem to be overtaken by the urge to control something.

My partner’s parents moved into a new condo a while back, and when we stayed there recently they told us about some sort of radon mitigation that was going on in their basement. A seed was planted. Days later, when we got home, I started thinking, “What about my basement? What’s the radon situation down there?”

Actually, first I thought: “What’s radon?” I learned that it is a gas with a pretty terrifying collection of adjectives surrounding it. Colorless, odorless, radioactive, and—possibly most awful—naturally occurring. I learned that it’s pretty easy to test for, too. You put a test kit in your basement for a set amount of time, send it off to a lab, and there you have it.

I was about to buy one of these test kits when an important question popped into my mind: Do radon levels change a lot, or do they stay pretty stable? Turns out, this was a good question. Radon levels can fluctuate a lot, so there are short term tests and long term tests. Information derived from both kinds of tests can be meaningful, blah, blah, blah.

What I realized is: I’m going to want to be testing for radon a lot. In fact, if I get a high reading, I’m going to want to test again right away, and I’m not going to want to wait around for lab results. And if I end up buying a bunch of tests, I’m going to end up spending some money.

Hence, the Airthings Corentium Home, which is good for a bunch of reasons. First, it just does one thing: monitor radon levels. Second, it monitors both short term and long term levels simultaneously. Third, it is battery-operated, which is important, because these things are supposed to go, like, in the middle of your basement, away from walls and stuff.

There are cheaper radon monitors, but they either needed to be plugged in or seemed shaky where reliability and accuracy were concerned. You can also spend a lot more on an air monitor like the Airthings 2960 View Plus that monitors radon as well as stuff like CO2 and VOCs, but it occurred to me that I don’t really care that much about the CO2 reading in my basement, where I want to be checking the radon levels.

So far (it’s been about a month), the Corentium Home has been great. What I mean by that is, it’s done exactly what it was supposed to do. The long term radon level in our home so far is just above ideal, but below the level where the powers that be would be required to mitigate it in any way. Basically, it’s okay for now. And I’m glad to know that. I think.