Since the new roof was going on it was time to put the hole in for the second radon fan. All this time the fan was in the garage but I was reluctant to try to cut a hole in the roof. I had the exhaust pipe capped in the attic. With the solar tiles going on it was now or never.
I had been working in the attic anyway to figure out the poor performance of the ERV so I thought that is better get that pipe in. In my mind it was a simple matter of continuing the 4” pvc radon pipe out the roof. Of course that was impossible because I hit a rafter going straight up. So I moved over a bit and hit another rafter. There were two rafters close together at the gable edge. I had to go to the store and get two 45° elbows to move the hole over to the other side. By the time I had those ready the roofers had torn off the old shingles. That was great but I had to have the hole ready for the membrane crew. I luckily was able to get the third hole in the right place and drilled through with a long bit. Then I went up on the roof to finish the hole and one of the roofers drilled it for me. He even borrowed a better drill to do it.
Then I stuck the pipe through the roof and of course it was slanted. I had glued the 2 45° elbows to go straight up through the roof. It didn’t occur to me that the pipe would exit at the angle of the roof. One of the roofers asked if I would straighten it and I said no. I don’t even know how. He said I had to hold a level up to it going through the roof. But then the hole saw would not have been large enough and anyway they fixed it or at least hid it with the vents they used.
I had to pull down a section of drywall to get the new hole drilled but that was easy since the drywall was overlapping at this point. Poor job up here because they didn’t want to do it.
I had barely enough room to install the fan inside instead of over the roof. The first fan was installed outside. Because the pipe was too close to the roof to fit the fan. Although a bit hard to see in this photo the crew painted the first fan and pipe black to match the roof. The fan is on the right next to the man working on the roof.
There are two Tesla vents on this section of roof. One is for the ERV exhaust and the other for the second radon fan.
The second radon fan is installed and wired. I designed the system based on some pretty comprehensive research and a case study so waiting so long for the second fan was probably not such a great idea. But there seems to be much disagreement about the dangers of in-home radon so at least we have had a partial system the whole time.