Airthings Corentium Home Radon Detector - 224 Portable, Lightweight, Easy-to-Use, (3) AAA Battery Operated, Intl Version, Bq/m

I purchased the product over a year ago from Amazon and it has been performing perfectly.I live in an area which has a granite bedrock and as such, has higher than normal radon levels. I found the Corentium Home to be very easy to use. It takes a few days before a relaible radon reading is obtained but the longer you measure, the higher the accuracy of the measurement. For the technically-minded, it uses an alpha scintillator to directly measure the radioactive decay of both the radon and the radon decay products. Battery life is very good (I'm still using the original set of batteries) and product support from Airthings has been excellent. If you are going to buy a radon detector, then this is definitely the one to choose. The only criticism I have is that it is not supplied with a stand.

I purchased the detector for domestic use and it has worked very well, measuring both the long and short term averages of the prescence of radon in different locations around my home.Latterly an error code was displayed and I therefore contacted the company resulting in a replacement being provided.I am very satisfied with the Corentium Home and the support provided by Airthings.

When they do work, these detectors seem pretty effective. And there's the rub. Because a high proportion of these devices have issues, if my experience is anything to go by, and don't actually work as they should.I've purchased a total of five units, at not inconsiderable expense I may add. Two of those fail utterly the get past the initial calibration stage, and have never performed a measurement (see image) Another two will calibrate when and if they feel like it, after multiple initialisation attempts. One of them has worked perfectly, as it should. ONE OUT OF FIVE. That's a defect rate of 80 percent!!! And no, I'm not some numpty, I'm a guy who understands technology and how to operate it. I really am quite perturbed by this, and it calls into serious question the companies' quality control abilities. I would guess that there's possibly a batch issue and a problem with the hardware / software interface. But whatever it is, it should have been identified and rectified long before product left the factory. Ironically, one of the factors that attracted me in my initial purchase decision was that these are not made in China like most electronics these days, but built in Norway. I notice that AirThings latest device, The Wave, is built instead in Tunisia, of all places.So, this ought to be a five star device, and indeed I'd be rating it as such if all five of my units worked correctly. Having struggled to get three operating, (one fully and two partially at least) and finally managing to test them over a period of time lined up next to one another I can confirm that they do show very similar readings. I therefore feel more confident that the readings they give are a good indication of the actual environmental conditions they are measuring. I am left with nagging worries of future flakiness of my detectors though. Will they ever re-calibrate when I change the batteries, or I decide to relocate them to another room and need to re-set them?This device gives three readings - the top figure on the display is the annual average and the bottom alternates every three seconds between the daily and weekly average. I like this feature, and the daily average is a good way of spotting short term radon build-up, allowing you to take remedial action such as increasing the ventilation. The screen is not illuminated, but that's fine, and if it were it would waste battery power, and significantly reduce the excellent two year projected battery life. I'd have liked to see a flash memory incorporated that stored the historic readings though. As it stands, whenever you replace the three AAA batteries it wipes the device, and your accurate, long term averages are entirely lost. I'd encourage AirThings to address this after they sort out their reliability issues.I have mine mounted on the bedroom wall, and it's a small and neat device. The display is easy to read and informative.POSITIVESAllows you to be informed about your household / workplace radon levels - an important health and safety issue.Allows you to discover radon hot-spots, and to take remedial action to reduce exposureAppears to be accurateSelf contained with its own screen - not reliant on wireless links to other devicesNo glowing lights to annoy you in the night.Once set up, nothing else to do.Not made in ChinaNEGATIVESSerious reliability concernsPoor quality control / testing regime at factory, it would seemNo flash memory - readings lost when battery dies or is removedRandom and seemingly meaningless error codes when it fails to calibrate (twelve different codes and counting...)Instruction booklet somewhat sparse.CONCLUSIONSThis is an unusual situation. The one detector that I have which is working correctly is excellent, and on it's own I'd be awarding five stars without hesitation. It's just the problems with the other four that worry me, and drop my rating to only two stars. Two DOA duds and two with intermittent calibration faults just isn't acceptable by any measure.I really do hope that Airthings sort out this product rather than just retiring it in favour of the new Wave. For some applications, a self contained unit such as this is exactly what you need. This is actually a very good device. It just needs a little work by Airthings first, to sort out the issues I've raised, before I can recommend you purchase one. Once that's done, I'll be happy to raise my rating to the five stars that it ought to have been in the first place. In the meantime I suggest you wait for positive confirmation of improvements before you part with your own money. I'll be taking this up with the company directly, and will report back when I receive a response. Watch this space.Over to you, Airthings..._____________________UPDATE: Customer support at Airthings appears woeful so far. Over a week ago I sent an email which has been ignored, as was a forwarded copy. I publicly tweeted my experience, which elicited an anonymous tweet back assuring me that their customer support is speedy. Still no actual addressing of issues raised or response to my emails, despite the assurance! But I shan't be giving up._____________________UPDATE: 7/7/18I have now been contacted by Airthings customer support, who have offered to ship me four replacement units. It appears that the company is now keen to rectify the cause of the problems. I will keep you updated._____________________UPDATE: 29/07/18I've returned two faulty units to Amazon for a refund, and Airthings have kindly sent me two replacement detectors, both of which, so far, have worked perfectly. I have had no confirmation from the company as to what they believe the problem might have been, but given other Amazon customers have encountered similar issues, I surmise that there was either a batch manufacturing issue or a batch was damaged, perhaps by impact. The detectors are packaged by Airthings in a simple cardboard box without any of the usual foam impact protection, so perhaps that might be a contributing factor. It's an issue I mentioned to customer support, but not one they have replied to as yet. I shall be testing the replacement detectors for a few weeks to ensure they are reliable, then I'll report back again.

Good if you check daily but a full annual report doesn’t seem available. The average is helpful but I’ll need another to see what’s going but good to have. Easy to use

We live in a high radon area, but everyone in this location is pretty laid back and laughs about radon as a serious health risk.I don't know why I spontaneously 'decided' to be concerned about radon one day, but I did. A spot of searching on Amazon and I came up with this product on sale and bought it to set my mind at rest. I thought we'd probably have ok readings and could then pass it onto other members of the extended family to use and test their levels...Well, imagine the shock when the device came back with 280 as our first reading....That was almost a year ago now. We immediately started living with all the double-glazing windows on the latch and racked up a huge heating bill last year whilst we figured out what to do. There are no radon specialists here and no one seems to know anything... We have done a lot of googling.We installed a positive ventilation unit in the attic (£800), which takes air from the attic and circulates it into the house. We were stumped when our levels didn't drop at all. Then I had the brainwave of putting this device in the attic, to measure radon levels there. We discovered they were as high or higher in the attic, as they were in the rest of the house!!!!! So we were just moving radon from the attic into the rest of the house.We took out that PIV unit and we installed another one (£1K) which takes air from outside, heats it slightly and puts THAT into the house. I can't quite bring myself to close the windows to check if it's working yet...Meanwhile, we took out all the ventilation bricks around our bungalow, only to discover they all hit walls - so there is almost no air circulation under our house - no wonder we have radon. We are now drilling through the walls in numerous places to install more vents...Anyway - long story - but without this little device we'd never have known what we needed to do. After trying something, we can test again and keep seeing what is working... We can see levels go up and down according to wind levels, rain etc. TOTALLY WORTH IT.The only thing is: I don't want to lend ours to extended family now, so might just buy my sister one for Xmas...