SarahCotswolds
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- SN14
We have a cellar, which is open to the study above it with no door. It is extremely damp and it has open stairs into the study above it. We don't actually use the cellar and have no use for it because things get mouldy when we put them in there anyway and it is very low in height. We recently discovered that we have extremely high radon in the cellar, which is then permeating into the rest of the house. The radon specialist companies try and sell you extremely expensive pumps and we haven't ruled out that idea. However, this would need to be coupled with blocking off the cellar because otherwise the pump could just distribute the radon further around the house. As we do not want or need the cellar and the stairs and opening to the cellar actually take up about a third of the study, we quite like the idea of blocking it off to give us a bigger study and also to contain the radon issue. The concern that we have is that if we block off the cellar are we going to create huge problems for ourselves in terms of the damp coming up through the floor or elsewhere? I would imagine that this will not be the first time that somebody will have blocked up or filled in the cellar, but whenever I google it, it seems to suggest tanking it, which we do not want to do. One option would be to install some form of ventilation pipe into the cellar (there are no air bricks currently, and I think it would be quite difficult to drill down into from road level). If we were to block it off then what is currently the stairs could be used to feed a ventilation pipe into presumably and then the floor built around that pipe. Would a ventilation pipe provide sufficient ventilation to prevent the high levels of damp from causing problems within the study / rest of the house? We are aware that this may not solve the radon problem and we may need pumps elsewhere, but seeing as the radon level is far higher down there than anywhere else, the cellar is unusable and the stairs to it take up so much floor space in the study we would like to investigate this option anyway.
