Investigation of the performance of various low-cost radon monitors under variable environmental conditions

Abstract

A comparison of low-cost radon monitors was conducted at the Laboratory of Natural Radiation (LNR). The monitors we evaluated were EcoQube, RadonEye, RadonEye Plus2, Spirit, ViewPlus, ViewRadon and WavePlus. An AlphaGUARD monitor calibrated at the Laboratory of Environmental Radioactivity of the University of Cantabria (LaRUC), accredited for testing and calibration according to ISO/IEC 17025, provided the reference value of radon concentration. The temporal stability of the monitors was studied, obtaining a percentage of missing records ranged from 1% to 19% of the data. The main technical characteristics studied were temporal stability, measurement ranges, accuracy, correlation and response time. The main results show that the measurement ranges align with those specified by their manufacturers, with percentage differences with respect to the reference monitor of between 5% and 16%. The diversity found for response time is remarkable, with values ranging from 1 to 15 h, with Pearson correlation factors between 0.63 and 0.90.