It depends on the overall goal of the company, the clients, and the industry.

If we mitigate a million homes and only reduced the radon concentrations by 1 pCi/L each, that is still a significant number of families with lower exposures. On the other hand, if we don't have a process to follow up and ensure that the million systems continue to work long into the future, we failed the consumers and have done little for risk reduction.

In my opinion the real estate transaction is an great opportunity to educate and to perform testing and mitigation. I urge Canada to embrace it, not abandon it. There are a lot of good things that have and are continuing to happen in the US so I encourage your folks to borrow the good parts, improve upon the bad, and try not to reinvent the wheel.

Shawn

There is definitely a big difference in the Canadian and US mitigation industries. The major US market driver has been the real estate transaction where the client (home seller) wants quick and cheap, therefore skipping diagnostics and system design Is common. Some US mitigators have stopped catering to those people so they can charge more in order to do the job correctly, mitigate the entire structure, alleviate headaches, and assure better and longer lasting radon systems.

The Canadians that I have spoken to at the CARST conferences the last couple years are putting in fewer systems, but they are actually getting paid well to do the jobs correctly.

So on one hand, the US is getting more overall risk reduction due to the size of the industry and number of homes we touch, but the Canadians may be getting better house-to-house results on average?

My guess is that instead of seeing a huge quality gap between certified vs non-certified, or US vs Canada, the most obvious gap is likely non real estate vs real estate when clients aren’t willing to pay for time spent on diagnostics and just barely passing the post-mitigation test is acceptable.

Shawn Price