My fascination for all things Nuclear started at a young age. Having visited the Chernobyl site in late 2018, I decided I wanted to set up some radiation monitoring at home!

The UK average background radiation dose (for June 2020) from the UK's Radioactive Incident Monitoring Network (RIMNet) is 0.11 uSv/hr

Learn more here

https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/radioactive-incident-monitoring

On the 'Ellastone Monitor' page, you can see the live values from my geiger counter set up in Ellastone and compare them to the UK government value


I built the detector from an American kit. It is essentially a HV generator connected to a Geiger Muller tube.

Each time a particle or wave based instance of ionising radiation hits the Geiger-Muller tube, the high voltage is disrupted and the circuitry counts the number of times this happens. This is then converted into an equivalent dose based on the number of incidences of radiation detected in 10 minute blocks.

See the live dose rate here