  Commercial alpha counters are used in science and industry applications to
screen materials for surface radon progeny contamination. In this paper, we
characterize an XIA UltraLo-1800, an ionization drift alpha counter, and study
the response to embedded charge in polyethylene sample measurements. We show
that modeling such effects is possible in a Geant4-based simulation framework
and attempt to derive corrections. This paper also demonstrates the
effectiveness of the use of an anti-static fan to eliminate the embedded charge
and recover a 97.73% alpha detection efficiency in the alpha counter.
