This site does one thing: help homeowners in Duluth and St. Louis County understand radon and connect with an MDH-licensed professional — for testing, system design, installation, and the confirmation test that proves it worked.
Most companies that install radon systems in northern Minnesota do it alongside four other trades. Radon is the thing they do between basement waterproofing jobs. This site is built around the opposite idea — that a house with a radon problem deserves a specialist who thinks about soil gas all day — and it exists to connect Duluth homeowners with an MDH-licensed one.
Duluth is a genuinely unusual place to mitigate radon, and the reasons are geological and architectural at the same time.
The city sits on the Duluth Complex — hard gabbro and basalt with a thin, rocky skin of glacial soil over the top. Fractured bedrock near the surface moves soil gas efficiently, and there is not much soil above it to slow anything down. Then there is the hillside. Thousands of Duluth homes are cut into a steep grade, which produces walkout basements, daylight basements, split foundations, and rooms that are below grade on one wall and above grade on another. That is a lot of contact surface between conditioned space and rock.
Add the housing stock. A large share of this city was built before 1950, which means hollow block and fieldstone foundations, partial crawl spaces under additions, open sump pits, and slabs that were poured over whatever was on hand. And then add the heating season, which in Duluth runs most of the year and keeps the stack effect pulling soil gas upward for months at a stretch.
None of that is a reason to panic. It is a reason to measure, and it is why a system designed for a flat-lot rambler in southern Minnesota is often the wrong system here.
These are the standards to hold any Duluth radon contractor to — and what to expect from the licensed pros this site connects you with.
This matters more here than in most states. Minnesota law requires anyone performing radon testing or mitigation in a building they do not own or lease to hold a license from the Minnesota Department of Health. National industry certification on its own does not satisfy that requirement.
Any radon testing or mitigation you arrange should be performed by an MDH-licensed professional. You should ask for a license number on any radon quote you receive in this state. A contractor who cannot produce one should not be touching your foundation, and a system installed without one creates a problem in your disclosure the next time you sell.
Every finished system also carries a permanent label with the installing contractor's information on it. If you have a system already and there is no tag on the pipe, that is worth asking about — it usually means the work was not permitted or not licensed.
The service area covered here runs across Duluth proper — Lakeside, Lester Park, Congdon Park, Hunters Park, Woodland, Kenwood, Duluth Heights, Piedmont Heights, Central and East Hillside, Lincoln Park, West Duluth, Norton Park, Riverside, Morgan Park, Gary–New Duluth, Fond du Lac, and Bayview Heights — plus Hermantown, Proctor, Rice Lake, Duluth Township, Two Harbors, Esko, and Cloquet.
The work itself covers short-term and long-term radon testing, sub-slab and drain tile mitigation systems, sub-membrane systems for crawl spaces, testing inside a real estate transaction, and commercial and multifamily buildings.
If your test comes back under 2 pCi/L, a contractor worth hiring will tell you that you do not need a system right now and to retest in two years. If your foundation is straightforward and a single suction point will handle it, they should not be designing a three-point system. And if the right first move on a commercial building is HVAC balancing rather than a fan on a pipe, they should say so.
There is no version of good radon work that succeeds if the number does not go down. The test at the end is the whole product.
A test takes 48 hours and tells you whether there is anything to fix. If there is, you will get a real number for what a system on your specific foundation would cost.