Search Results (4)

In addition to cheap track-etch and expensive research-grade radon monitors, for several years, a new generation of affordable consumer-grade active monitors has been available. Their performance raises the question of whether they could also be used for certain objectives in a scientific context. This requires particular QA/QC as well as understanding their behavior and their limitations. This paper reports experiences with the RadonEye acquired over approximately two years, mainly for recording time series of radon concentration indoors and outdoors. Specific topics include calibration uncertainty, assessed by recording parallel time series; response to thoron by exposing the monitor to thorium-bearing material; and some unresolved questions related to measurement statistics to date. The main results are that factory calibration is quite uncertain and that sensitivity to thoron has to be considered in practical usage. Some identified statistical issues regarding the occurrence of anomalies and possible non-Poisson uncertainty remain unresolved. Full article

Consumer-grade economical radon monitors are becoming increasingly popular in private and institutional use, in the contexts of both Citizen Science and traditional research. Although originally designed for screening indoor radon levels in view of radon regulation and decisions about mitigation or remediation—motivated by the health hazard posed by high radon concentrations—researchers are increasingly exploring their potential in some environmental studies. For long time, radon has been used as a tracer for investigating atmospheric transport processes. This paper focuses on RadonEye, currently the most sensitive among low-cost monitors available on the market, and specifically, its potential use for monitoring very low radon concentrations. It has two objectives: firstly, discussing issues of statistics of low count rates, and secondly, analyzing radon concentration time series acquired with RadonEyes outdoors and in low-radon indoor spaces. Regarding the first objective, among other things, the inference radon concentration reported to expected true is discussed. The second objective includes the application of autoregressive methods and fractal statistics to time series analysis. The overall result is that radon dynamics can be well captured using this “low-tech” approach. Statistical results are plausible; however, few results are available in the literature for comparison, particularly concerning fractal methods. The paper may therefore be seen as an incentive for further research in this direction. Full article

A comparison of low-cost radon monitors was conducted at the Laboratory of Natural Radiation (LNR). The monitors we evaluated were EcoQube, RadonEye, RadonEye Plus2, Spirit, ViewPlus, ViewRadon and WavePlus. An AlphaGUARD monitor calibrated at the Laboratory of Environmental Radioactivity of the University of Cantabria (LaRUC), accredited for testing and calibration according to ISO/IEC 17025, provided the reference value of radon concentration. The temporal stability of the monitors was studied, obtaining a percentage of missing records ranged from 1% to 19% of the data. The main technical characteristics studied were temporal stability, measurement ranges, accuracy, correlation and response time. The main results show that the measurement ranges align with those specified by their manufacturers, with percentage differences with respect to the reference monitor of between 5% and 16%. The diversity found for response time is remarkable, with values ranging from 1 to 15 h, with Pearson correlation factors between 0.63 and 0.90. Full article

Radon poses significant health risks. Thus, the continuous monitoring of radon concentrations in buildings’ indoor air is relevant, particularly in schools. Low-cost sensors devices are emerging as promising technologies, although their reliability is still unknown. Therefore, this is the first study aiming to evaluate the performance of low-cost sensors devices for short-term continuous radon monitoring in the indoor air of nursery and primary school buildings. Five classrooms of different age groups (infants, pre-schoolers and primary school children) were selected from one nursery and one primary school in Porto (Portugal). Radon indoor concentrations were continuously monitored using one reference instrument (Radim 5B) and three commercially available low-cost sensors devices (Airthings Wave and RandonEye: RD200 and RD200P2) for short-term sampling (2–4 consecutive days) in each studied classroom. Radon concentrations were in accordance with the typical profiles found in other studies (higher on weekends and non-occupancy periods than on occupancy). Both RadonEye low-cost sensors devices presented similar profiles with Radim 5B and good performance indices (R² reaching 0.961), while the Airthings Wave behavior was quite different. These results seem to indicate that the RadonEye low-cost sensors devices studied can be used in short-term radon monitoring, being promising tools for actively reducing indoor radon concentrations. Full article