Radon in Quakertown and Pittstown

Quakertown and Pittstown sits in Franklin Township — the crossroads villages at the centre of Franklin Township, in the farm country west of Flemington.

Housing stock. 18th and 19th century village houses and farmsteads alongside later large-lot residential building.

Water supply. Public supply barely reaches this township. A Franklin Township well draws from the western Newark Basin rock that also delivers the soil gas, which makes two measurements the complete answer rather than one.

The ground under Quakertown and Pittstown

Franklin Township is farm country at the western edge of the Newark Basin, and much of its housing is pre-1900 — Quakertown and Pittstown are both old crossroads villages with 18th and 19th century houses still in use. That matters because the foundations are stone, the cellars are shallow, and floors were often added long after the walls were built, if at all. Where a cellar floor is earth or partial, a membrane system is the right answer and a slab system simply has nothing to work with. Wells here draw from the same fractured rock beneath, so for any address on one the water side is a routine second question rather than an unusual one.

None of that describes a particular property. Formations cross municipal boundaries freely, so where a specific address falls is a question for the NJ Geological Survey's bedrock mapping, and what it means under the floor is a question for a diagnostic test.

Around Quakertown and Pittstown. The requests come from the Quakertown village crossroads and the Friends meeting house; the Pittstown area and the Route 513 corridor; the Cherryville and Sidney roads country; the Capoolong Creek valley; the farmland toward the Union and Alexandria township lines.

Working here

Open rural lots with room to work; village properties are tighter.

What moves the cost here

The old housing is the cost story. An open or partly floored cellar means a membrane install rather than a slab install, and sealing a rubble foundation properly takes real hours. Newer houses on the surrounding acreage are conventional jobs by comparison.

Quakertown and Pittstown are both largely intact 18th and 19th century crossroads villages, so stone-foundation cellars are a common find in Franklin Township, and sub-membrane rather than sub-slab work follows more often here than in the county's newer townships.

Because so little of the township sits inside a public supply area, and the wells draw from fractured Newark Basin rock, a complete radon assessment here routinely means two measurements rather than one.

Permits and paperwork

Permits run through the Franklin Township construction office. With private wells throughout, a gross alpha result from a Private Well Testing Act sample at the point of sale is a frequent first indication that the water carries radon as well as the soil.

Worth checking rather than assuming: mailing addresses here often cross municipal lines, and some towns share construction-code services, so the office that issues your permit may not be the one on your envelope.