Thanks for sharing that! I talk to home owners all the time, asking for my opinion on the homeowner grade devices. Now I have a reasonable facsimile of science I can share with them instead of a loosely assembled list of experiences with the various devices.
Especially, thanks to the Canadian group that pulled this together!
Great Job to Pam and team!!! For those of you who are not aware Pam is a founding member of CARST (she lead the founding committee) and serves as the ExO for CARST and C-NRPP. Canada would not be in the position it is with radon without her leadership.
Thank you very much for sharing this work.
A few notes:
1) It was reassuring to see the confirmation of reasonable accuracy of the different new consumer radon units under the different test conditions, with no grade worse than C.
2) It was gratifying to see the authors' understanding of the factors involved. Their proposal for recognizing the inherent uncertainties is important for manufacturers to take into consideration in their communications with device users. Many device users do not understand the nature of radon variability or the randomness of radioactive decay, so educating them is worthwhile.
3) This note by the authors in the conclusions also reflects a critical need: "In this project the tests were conducted on newly purchased monitors, and it is possible that accuracy and precision may change over the lifetime of the monitor. Since there exists no framework currently for calibration of these consumer-grade radon monitors, it will be important to determine how they perform over time. It is the intent of the authors to continue this project by keeping the monitors that were evaluated this year so that they may be re-evaluated next year, along with a selection of new monitors." I was gratified to see this need anticipated so well.
Outstanding job, Pam and Canadian radon colleagues. I am so proud of your spirit and contributions which are more important in the limited research in the U.S. We look forward to your next paper. Best wishes to CARST members especially those who serve in leadership positions.
This is very informative. I also get asked frequently from homeowners what I know about the various homeowner monitors. Until this I was only able to share my own limited experience which is a side by side test conducted between one of my CRM's and the homeowners monitor. Most all of the time the results are very close however, I have had a few instances with one particular model being off to the high side (I would rather have it read high than low for the homeowner). These were monitors that had been in use for a period of time so I will look forward to your report on extended use performance. Please share that information here if you can.