A week or so ago, I was listening to CBC Radio while I was getting the wood stove going before work, and they were talking about Radon testing in the Yukon.

Radon is a radioactive gas that naturally occurs from the breakdown of uranium in the rocks and soil. If it is able to accumulate in your home, it can damage your lungs, and cause lung cancer.

This is something I’ve known for a long time, but the test kits are expensive, or hard to find, and need 3 months to sample, so I just never addressed it.

This radio program said there are increased risks in the Yukon, higher levels of Radon, and then your risks can increase if:

• you don’t have the windows open for months at a time ✔️
• you are home most of the time, like if you work from home ✔️
• you have a crawl space ✔️
• if your house isn’t totally sealed and takes in air from the crawl space ✔️ (our living room is really drafty around the edges, where the baseboards were removed by a previous owner)

😬 Uh oh, I was checking all the boxes!

So I did some research to look for options. I settled on one that I could buy at Canadian Tire! It wasn’t cheap, but since we were in Whitehorse, it is now ours! We saved on the shipping costs.

The AirThings Wave Plus (Amazon link if you prefer) is the monitoring device we chose.

It’s about the size of a smoke detector, comes with batteries, and measures the radon level in your house, and also your humidity, VOC levels, CO2, and the temperature and pressure. It connects to an app on your phone via Bluetooth, and also has a dashboard available on the web.

The radon level needs to be calibrated for the first month, and even the VOC and CO2 levels need to calibrate over the first few days. But you can see the radon levels after 24 hours. Here’s what the dashboard looks like on my iPhone:

Fortunately, so far it looks like our radon levels are okay! Whew! I was curious about our CO2 levels. Note, this isn’t carbon monoxide, this is carbon dioxide, the gas we exhale. It’s getting more popular for people to track the carbon dioxide levels in your house (especially stay at home software engineers), because high levels can affect your sleep and concentration, and other than the cracks around our doors and floor, we don’t have a fresh air mechanism all winter.

But it turns out the VOC levels were the most surprising! I thought VOCs (volatile organic compounds) were usually from new furniture or fresh paint off-gassing. But the first night and into the next morning, our VOC levels spiked up! What on earth!?

Sure it’s just still in the calibration period, but what is causing that?

I went to the web to learn about the sources of VOC’s in a house and learned from the Canadian Government:

VOCs can get into indoor air from many sources, including:

• cooking, especially frying
• cigarette smoke
• candles and incense
• composite wood products, such as some furnishings and flooring materials
• building materials, such as paint, glues and varnish
• household products, such as air fresheners and cleaning products
• infiltration from attached garages, such as from vehicle exhaust
• combustion sources such as improperly vented fireplaces, wood stoves, gas stoves and furnaces

Source

Well I had put in a new air freshener in the bathroom, and I had washed Hank’s comforter that he had at the boarding kennel with scented fabric softener (because he’s stinky) and hung it to dry in a rack in the middle of the house. We hadn’t yet started the wood stove because Jeff bought a new door gasket in Whitehorse he wanted to install. Could it be the scented things!?! I guess maybe? Or it was still calibrating! Or is it from the oil space heater we heat the house with in the kitchen?

High VOCs can cause headaches and irritated breathing, also nausea, fatigue, and dizziness. Fascinating!

Anyway, you know I love a new gadget, so this one will be fun to use! I like to open the front and back door for a few minutes to refresh our air in the winter (the windows are frozen shut) so I also want to track how that impacts the numbers.

It’s called a Wave Plus because if you wave your hand over it, it’ll glow red, yellow, or green for a few seconds to tell you how your air is reporting. Ours is red right now because our VOCs are increasing again, and our humidity is too low.

Oh! Also, before I go, about radon, there is a map online that collects data from these devices, should you choose to share your data:

https://radonmap.com

I see one moderate radon level being recorded in Dawson City, and several high tests in Whitehorse. Take a look at your area to see what your risk level is.