Ben Ingalls, Owner of All Colorado Radon Mitigation, Inc.

Key members of the All Colorado Radon Mitigation, Inc. staff include (from left to right): Donald Rustin, Carly Bearden, Jake Blackstone, Shannon Hunt, Ryan Osborne, Brandon Fouts, Monty Wendt, Jessey Royce, Theo Zammiello, Nick Fouts and Ben Ingalls.

Colorado has mountains, skiing, beautiful national parks and many other natural wonders that draw people from around the country. It also has radon—and plenty of it.

When Ben Ingalls relocated to Colorado in 2000, he didn’t know much about radon other than the fact it was dangerous. Radon isn’t a concern in his native Georgia. But when a job opportunity presented itself at the Denver branch of a national radon mitigation chain, he threw himself into the business.

Three years later, Ben had become an expert on radon mitigation and found himself chomping at the bit for a new challenge. After wisely talking the matter over with his wife, Kory, the two of them decided to launch their own business—All Colorado Radon Mitigation, Inc. 

“It was stressful,” Ben says, “but exciting too. I knew I had the skills to do this; it was just a matter of getting out there and doing it. We started with a homemade website and business cards I handed out everywhere. We worked out of a pickup truck and out of our garage. It was referrals that really got us going and helped us take off. We went from a pickup truck to adding a storage unit, then an office, then employees, then more trucks. We went from 0 to 60 in 12 months.”

You Can’t See it, but it’s There

Radon itself is a byproduct of uranium, a gas released by the element as it decays. As a gas, Ben says, it’s drawn by pressure. Building a house on soil with radon in it creates a negative pressure inside the building, and convection within the walls pulls the radon into the house. Like uranium, radon decays. But while uranium has a half-life of billions of years, radon’s half-life is only about four days, Ben says. As the gas decays, it breaks down into lead, bismuth and polonium, each of which is a hazardous carcinogen. Left unchecked in a home, it can cause severe health problems for the people living there.

“There are a lot of signs a building may have a radon problem,” Ben says. “Most are obvious things, like if the house has a crawl space. Even in houses with a full concrete basement, there are expansion joints, and radon can slip in there. It’s an elemental gas, it can get in through any opening no matter how small. If you’ve got a hairline fracture in your basement floor, there’s a good chance you’ve got radon.”

It’s impossible to take the radon out of the soil on which the home—or business—was built. In a place like Colorado, which has large deposits of uranium, it’s all but unavoidable. The trick is to keep the radon in the soil from leaking into the building above.

“I build a system of piping and specialized fans to attract the gas and move it out of the house,” Ben says. “We want to access the soil below and around the house, drill through the slab and create a suction point. We use different grades of PVC piping and create a path, then install specialized fans that create a vacuum. Radon is a gas—it isn’t smart, it doesn’t care where it’s going. I apply a hundred times the pressure the house does, and the gas doesn’t have a choice where to go. The fans we use are specially made for this purpose. The gas enters a sealed environment and is exhausted into the sky where it’s instantly diluted by the fresh air, making it harmless.”

Commitment to Service

When Ben started All Colorado Radon Mitigation, he wanted to set new standards in the industry. Customer service is one of those. He had learned a lot about the radon mitigation business from his three years working for a national chain that specialized in this field. He also saw how business was done, and knew he wanted to do things a little differently.

“Working for a nationwide company taught me a lot about what to do and what not to do,” Ben says. “You learn that customer service and standing by your word is what it’s all about. I like to establish a personal relationship with every client and treat every house as if it is my own. Every job we do, we have a vested interest in it. This starts with having a conversation with a homeowner before we do the job, taking the homeowner’s input, and determining what the homeowner does and doesn’t want to see.”

Another area of focus for Ben is technical proficiency. Though it’s not required for operation, he and his employees are licensed and certified in radon mitigation through the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Colorado Department of Public Health & Environment (CDPHE).

“My goal personally is to be known as the best, as the go-to guy in the state for radon mitigation,” Ben says. “When someone needs the service, they know to call me without doing any searching. They know they’ll get the best possible service.”

He adds, “For my industry, I’d like to see more legitimacy. In my company, we’re all licensed and certified. But that’s not required. All certification and continuing education is still voluntary. I think both the state and the local municipalities need to increase regulations; they should require licensing, insurance and permitting for anyone operating in this industry. As it is, we’re competing against other quality companies, and also against the guys with no experience at all.”

Every Job is Different

Providing quality service often goes beyond basic mitigation and into the aesthetic side of a project, Ben says. The white PVC piping used to vent the radon outside is unattractive, says Ben. He frequently works with homeowners to find the best way to conceal the mitigation system so it doesn’t detract from the beauty of their homes.

“We look at every house we can and we do almost all estimates on site,” Ben says. “We walk through the house with the homeowner and explain what we can do. A lot of our clients appreciate that we take the extra time to do the projects right. In fact, some of our work comes from redoing other companies’ work, making it look better.”

As knowledge and understanding of the threat radon presents grows more widespread, Ben has seen his business start to shift from mitigating radon in existing structures to working with builders in new construction, incorporating mitigation systems in the infrastructure of new buildings, alongside plumbing and electrical systems. He’s currently working on the largest project in his company’s history, a collection of 16 apartment buildings within a single complex. Ben is also working with the CDPHE to provide mitigation solutions in low-income housing.

“With new construction, we go in when they have the slab formed and put the system in before the concrete pour,” Ben says. “Then we just build the system up through the building. More and more builders are starting to realize they can provide a radon-free environment right from the start and contractors are seeing it’s cheaper if we do it when the building is going up instead of trying to retrofit later. It also makes it easy for us to hide the system in the construction and prevent some of the aesthetic challenges you can have in a retrofit.”

Though new construction radon mitigation is on the rise, the majority of business for All Colorado Radon Mitigation comes from the installation of systems in existing structures. Ben’s background as a contractor comes in handy here, as each installation is different, and each one requires a certain amount of “thinking on his feet.”

“Every project is unique,” Ben says. “We do a lot of crawl space encapsulation, sealing the space up to make it mold- and mildew-free. We’ve done some crazy jobs in high-rises in downtown Denver. We’ve built systems inside an eight-story apartment building. One time, we had to do a job up in the mountains for a home that had a working silver mine in the basement. We had to find a way to vent the mine and mitigate the radon from the working part of the mine, installing systems all the way up through the house. Every job is outside the box. Each time it’s different.”

Though he’s only been in business since 2011, Ben is elated with the success of All Colorado Radon Mitigation, and is excited about the team he’s put together and the value of the work they do.

“I’m so proud of our team,” Ben says. “I have an unbelievable group of people working for me. They’re not only trustworthy and honest but they care about what they do. It’s so much easier when you have staff members that believe in their work. They’ll bend over backward for our customers. I have a group I can trust to represent me and my company every day.”

He concludes, “If you’d told me when I got started I’d be where I am now, I wouldn’t have believed it. But here we are and we got here by doing the right thing. We’re not just doing a job—we’re saving lives.”