Radon in Northeastern Pennsylvania: What a DEP-Certified Contractor Actually Finds

An expert interview with Matt Abell, DEP Certification #3632, Northeast Radon Solutions

Conducted 2026. All quotes reviewed by Matt Abell before publication.

Radon risk in Pennsylvania varies a lot from one region to the next, and even from one house to the next on the same street. What drives high readings in the Poconos isn't what drives them in the coal country to the west, and the fill a builder put under the slab often matters more than the map the house sits on. To document what that looks like in the field, PA Radon Hub interviewed Matt Abell, co-owner of Northeast Radon Solutions in Stroudsburg and a PA DEP-certified radon professional (Certification #3632, testing and mitigation; also NRPP-certified).

Matt runs the business with his brother-in-law and co-owner Ben Levine (PA DEP #3656, NRPP). Between them they have more than 40 years of combined experience and have installed over 250 systems across Monroe County and the Poconos, the Lehigh Valley, Pike County, and the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre area. The two owners do every job themselves, no subcontractors. Everything below comes from his own job records and his read on the geology, the houses, and the sales that drive radon work in this part of the state.

Craftsmanship is the thing he keeps coming back to. He spent years as a contractor doing electrical work before radon, and he's particular about the tools he uses — a 4-inch battery bandsaw that leaves a clean, square cut on the pipe instead of the mess a reciprocating saw makes, a clutched hole saw that won't wrench your arm if it catches a nail in the siding. The payoff isn't just his time; it's a tidier install in someone's home. He and Ben go into every house, he says, "installing the system as if we would want to install them on our own house."

That mindset shows up in how the systems look, too. Radon systems are large and not especially pretty, so Matt and Ben take pains to keep them out of the way — tucked behind a bush, screened by a chimney, run along the side of the house away from patios and entertaining areas. On a slab-on-grade home where the interior and exterior grades line up, they'll sometimes dig a shallow trench and go straight through the foundation wall so there's no interior piping at all.

PA Radon Hub is an independent statewide resource connecting Pennsylvania property owners with independent, DEP-certified radon professionals. We are not a contractor and not a government agency. This interview is editorial.

The geology: why Northeastern Pennsylvania runs high

Radon comes from uranium. As uranium decays through a chain of elements — radium sits about five steps down the sequence — it eventually produces radon, a gas that migrates up out of the soil and into houses. That decay chain is happening under every property in the region.

What makes Northeastern Pennsylvania distinct, in Matt's account, is the slate belt: the area around Bangor, Pen Argyl, and Wind Gap. Homes there are frequently built on blast rock or on fill excavated during construction.

"In a lot of those instances, the fill itself contains uranium byproducts," Matt said. When a builder blasts for a basement and then reuses the fragmented slate or shale on site as the drainage layer under the slab — rather than importing clean crushed stone — the material generating the radon ends up sitting directly beneath the floor.

That same fill creates a second problem: it is harder to mitigate. Broken slate compacts, and "when it compacts down, there's not a lot of airspace in between the layers." A mitigation fan works by pulling soil gas through the permeable layer under the slab. With little air space to draw through, the fan has to work harder — which is why these houses often demand a higher-powered fan, larger pipe, or multiple suction points.

Matt uses karst as an umbrella term for the carbonate rock deposits common across the Northeast that tend to go hand in hand with radon and uranium byproducts. But the version he runs into house by house is the slate-belt fill. What the builder put under the slab usually tells him more about a home's radon than any regional map does. Bangor, Pen Argyl, and Wind Gap all sit in Northampton County, an EPA Zone 1 county where basement tests average well above the 4.0 pCi/L action level.

What the numbers look like

Matt read recent results straight off his job database, all from installs this year. A house in Mount Pocono built in 1990 came in at 47.6 pCi/L and finished at 0.6. One that tested at 87 dropped to 0.6 on the first try, and a 63.6 came down to 0.2, also first try. Others that year ran 57 down to 2.5, 45.4 to 2.5, 41.3 to 1.3, 40 to 1, and 38 down to 0.5. The EPA action level is 4.0 pCi/L, so most of these houses started at ten to twenty times that and landed well under 1.0. The highest readings Matt has measured over his career reached into the low hundreds — 120 to 140 in past years — though he says those are uncommon. Mount Pocono and Northeast Radon Solutions' Stroudsburg base both sit in Monroe County, the core of the Poconos.

He is careful with homeowners about what a number means. "I always tell people not to be alarmed if their level goes above 4.0, because what matters is the average over time, not instantaneous spikes." Radon moves with the weather, so one high reading on a consumer monitor is not the whole story; what the house averages over time is.

He is just as straight about who radon actually affects. "Some people could be living in a house with highly elevated levels for decades and be unaffected. Other people might take just a couple of years at a moderate exposure and they may suffer the effects of it. There's not a lot of rhyme or reason to it." Because it's unpredictable, the sensible thing is to manage what you can measure — the long-term average — and bring it down.

Matt estimates that statewide, roughly 40% of Pennsylvania homes test above the EPA threshold, and that in Northeastern Pennsylvania, "about every other house has an elevated radon problem." Pennsylvania is among the highest-radon states in the country; the specific figures here are Matt's field estimates for his region.

How the mitigation works

The system Northeast Radon Solutions installs is active soil depressurization (ASD): a fan pulls soil gas from beneath the slab through a sealed pipe and vents it above the roofline, where it disperses.

Matt's first move on most houses is to find a sump pit. "Sump pits usually are connected to a network of perforated drainage pipes that drain into that sump. So if you're able to connect the fan to the sump pit and then create an airtight seal over top of it," the suction is no longer localized to a single drilled hole — it "telegraphs out through those drainage laterals." Instead of pulling from one point, the fan pulls along every drainage pipe run under the basement. It is more effective and more reliable, and it is why the sump is his preferred suction point when one exists.

He installs 4-inch pipe as his standard. Three-inch works fine, he's quick to say, but 4-inch carries roughly 50% more air volume, and that headroom matters to him. "If you end up in a situation where you're not getting a great enough reduction, your options are pretty small with that 3-inch pipe." Going with the larger pipe from the start leaves room to bring a stubborn house down without tearing the system out and redoing it.

The work itself is a clean division of labor. Ben handles the interior — coring the slab, running pipe, setting the manometer, penetrating the rim joist, mounting the fan, wiring the electrical, and carrying pipe to the roofline — while Matt handles electrical and the overall workflow. It's a split they landed on because it's what each of them already did well: interior work was Ben's job when he worked for his father-in-law, and Matt had years of electrical behind him. They carry four or five fan models on the truck so they can match the fan to what they actually find under the slab, rather than forcing a stock unit to do a job it isn't sized for. Most installs run about an hour and a half to two hours, and then they return to retrieve the post-mitigation test.

The post-mitigation test is where Matt is most particular. On about 95% of jobs, Northeast Radon Solutions leaves a continuous digital radon monitor — set for a 24-hour delay so the system can get to work, then run for at least 48 hours — and comes back to pick it up. The alternative a lot of homeowners get handed is a charcoal packet they have to deploy themselves, mail to a lab, and wait on. Because Matt and Ben set the digital monitor and read it themselves, they can stand behind the result: they know how it was placed, they know it wasn't compromised in the mail, and they can get a homeowner a report in about three days instead of the week-plus a lab turnaround takes. On a digital monitor they can also see the hour-by-hour trend, not just a single averaged number, which makes it easier to trust that the average is real.

When it's hard: the Saylorsburg house

Most modern houses come down on the first try, but a few don't. The hardest one Matt has mitigated was in Saylorsburg, a house built in the 1990s, new enough that he figured it for a routine job.

The standard system did nothing. "It didn't go down at all." He and Ben returned, boosted to their most powerful fan, and dug out the suction point further. It still tested high. The root cause was under the slab: the house sat on in-situ stone — slate pieces rather than a proper crushed-gravel drainage layer — with almost no annular space for the fan to draw through.

The fix was a second, independent system in the garage, with its own high-powered fan on that side of the house. That finally did it. Matt has installed a second system on a single house only twice in decades.

Saylorsburg is the kind of house he means when he says, "Sometimes there's underlying construction you can't see." An oversized interior footing running under a bearing wall can stop suction from telegraphing across a basement — the fan on one side just can't reach the other. Houses like that don't get solved with a bigger fan. They get solved by reading how the house was built and putting a second suction point where the hidden structure forces you to.

Radon and real estate

Most of Matt's work is tied to a home sale — either a house headed to market or a mitigation written into a closing as a negotiated term. Roughly half of it comes through realtors, most of that as a referral where the agent hands the homeowner off and Matt deals with them directly. On a closing timeline, what matters is being prepared and communicating clearly: confirming the appointment before they drive out, carrying what the job might need, and not surprising anyone. His fastest full turnaround for a closing is three to four days, install to verified result. He points to a recent one where a realtor had a closing bearing down: "We did the mitigation on a Friday and we had results by Monday."

He's blunt about what agents want out of the process. "They just want it done so it doesn't mess up their sale, for the most part." The friction he runs into isn't agents, it's timing — people who wait until the last minute and then expect a same-day result. There's a DEP- and NRPP-set minimum the test has to run through no matter who's in a hurry, which is why he tells people to call the moment they know, not the week of closing.

There's one more thing he does on nearly every job. Even when a post-mitigation reading already meets the criteria for a real-estate transaction, Matt tells the homeowner the EPA recommends getting below 2.0 pCi/L where possible, and lays out the options to get there — a bigger fan, more suction points, or both. The EPA's action level is 4.0 pCi/L, and its guidance is to consider fixing anywhere between 2.0 and 4.0. Matt raises that lower target instead of stopping at "it passed."

Systems do fail the first retest once in a while — Matt puts it at 3–5% of jobs, with only about 1% needing a scheduled return to add suction points. When a guaranteed system misses, they upsize the fan, leave another digital monitor, and come back to confirm it cleared. That guarantee covers houses built in 1980 or newer. As Matt puts it, houses older than that "can present a lot of tricky issues that you often can't foresee," and he won't promise around what he can't see.

How to verify a radon mitigator

In Pennsylvania, radon testing and mitigation professionals are certified by the state, and every certification can be checked. Matt Abell holds PA DEP Certification #3632 for testing and mitigation, and Ben Levine holds #3656 for mitigation; both are also NRPP-certified. Look up any contractor you're considering in the PA DEP Radon Services Directory before you hire them.

Past the certification, a few questions tell you whether a mitigator does careful work. Ask how they verify the result — whether they set and retrieve a monitor themselves or leave a test packet for you to handle. Ask what the guarantee actually covers, since a guarantee tied to a specific construction era, like Matt's 1980-or-newer scope, tells you more than a blanket promise. And ask what insurance they carry; Northeast Radon Solutions carries environmental hazard mitigation insurance.

PA Radon Hub does not perform radon testing or mitigation and is not affiliated with the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection. We connect property owners with independent, DEP-certified professionals and encourage every homeowner to verify certification before hiring.

Northeast Radon Solutions also serves the surrounding counties:

• Radon mitigation in Lehigh County (Lehigh Valley)
• Radon mitigation in Pike County
• Radon mitigation in Lackawanna County (Scranton)
• Radon mitigation in Luzerne County (Wilkes-Barre)

Frequently asked questions

What causes high radon in Northeastern Pennsylvania? Uranium in the region's bedrock decays into radon gas that migrates up into homes. In the slate belt around Bangor, Pen Argyl, and Wind Gap, houses are often built on blast rock or excavated slate fill that itself contains uranium byproducts, driving readings higher than in areas that import clean drainage stone.

Can radon mitigation really bring very high readings down to safe levels? Yes. In Northeast Radon Solutions' recent field records, houses testing in the 40s, 50s, and 80s pCi/L were routinely brought below 1.0 pCi/L, most on the first attempt. The EPA action level is 4.0 pCi/L.

How long does a radon mitigation system take to install? Most residential systems take about an hour and a half to two hours to install. The contractor then returns to retrieve a post-mitigation test, so a full closing-ready turnaround is typically three to four days.

Should I panic if my home radon monitor reads above 4.0? No. What matters is the average over time, not a single instantaneous spike. Radon levels fluctuate with weather and season, which is why professionals recommend testing across multiple seasons and focusing on the long-term average.

Is radon higher in the basement than upstairs? Usually. As a rule of thumb, each floor up runs roughly half the level of the one below — an 8 pCi/L basement might read about 4 on the first floor and 2 on the top floor. This is only a guideline; ventilation systems can distribute radon unevenly, so each level should be tested to be certain.

Radon is heavier than air — why does it rise into my house? Radon is slightly heavier than air, but it moves by pressure differential, not gravity. In winter, the temperature difference between inside and outside creates a stack effect that pulls soil gas up through cracks and gaps in the foundation. A mitigation system reverses this by giving the gas a path of least resistance — up the pipe and out above the roofline.