A common assumption among Calgary buyers is that a brand-new home is automatically protected from radon. After all, modern construction is held to higher standards than ever. Unfortunately, that assumption is mistaken. New homes can — and often do — have radon levels above the guideline. Here is what the building code actually provides, and why a rough-in is only half the solution.
Radon comes from the soil beneath your home, not from the building materials or the age of the house. As long as your home sits on Alberta's uranium-bearing soils, the source of radon is present regardless of when the home was built. In fact, energy-efficient new homes are built to be very airtight, which is excellent for heating costs but means that any radon entering the home has fewer paths to escape. A tighter envelope can actually concentrate radon indoors.
Since 2015, the National Building Code — adopted in Alberta — has required new residential construction to include radon-control measures. In practice, this means your new Calgary home was built with a radon rough-in: a system of features designed to make future mitigation easy if it turns out to be needed.
A typical rough-in includes:
Here is what trips up many homeowners: a rough-in is not an active mitigation system. It is a passive provision — the plumbing for a future fix, not the fix itself. The capped pipe relies only on natural air movement to vent radon, which is often not enough to bring levels below 200 Bq/m³. Until a fan is added and the system is activated, the rough-in does little on its own.
In other words, builders are required to make mitigation easy, but they are not required to guarantee your home is below the guideline. That responsibility — and the testing that informs it — falls to you as the homeowner.
Because the rough-in is passive, the only way to know whether your new home is actually safe is to test it. We regularly see brand-new Calgary homes that test above the guideline despite having a code-compliant rough-in. The presence of the pipe stub is good news — it means activation will be simple and inexpensive — but it is not a substitute for knowing your number.
A long-term test of at least 90 days during the heating season gives the most accurate picture. Settle into the home for a season, then test.
If your new home tests high, the rough-in pays off. Because the under-slab gravel and the vertical pipe are already in place, a contractor can often activate the system simply by adding a properly sized radon fan and a manometer to the existing stub. This is typically faster and less expensive than retrofitting an older home that has no rough-in at all.
If you are buying or just took possession of new construction, ask:
A radon rough-in is a valuable head start, not a finished safeguard. New does not mean safe — it means ready. Test your home, and if levels are elevated, Onyx Radon can activate your rough-in with a C-NRPP-grade system and verify the result, turning that capped pipe into rock-solid protection.
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