I’m on the verge of doing a DIY soundproofing job on the party wall of my house and I want to make a post to share what I’ve learned and hopefully get some feedback.
My house is an A-rated semi-d built 2 years ago. The master bedrooms are attached on the party wall. The wall is a standard 4-inch (100mm) block laid flat with sand/cement render. My neighbours are very quiet people but I’m more anxious that we’re disturbing them. If they tap the bedroom wall with something hard or switch on the socket on the wall it’s loud enough to wake me up. We can hear them the odd time they raise their voices too. I’m wondering if that’s normal for this kind of wall construction or has something gone wrong? Some of my neighbors have complained to the builder in the past so I’m not the only one here concerned about it.
The DIY solution I’m planning to do is this: [Reductoclip direct to wall system](https://youtu.be/lI2bdQZWyOE)
It’s a resilient channel system with two staggered layers of acoustic plasterboard sandwiching a layer of mass-loaded vinyl (Tecsound). Any gaps are sealed with acoustic sealant, including a 5mm gap that is intentionally left between the plasterboard and the walls, ceilings and floors. I would lose about 60mm using this system. I’m also going to fill in the backboxes for the wall sockets and replace them with surface mount sockets.
The other system I thought about using is Mustwall 33B direct to the wall and acoustic plasterboard on top but I think the resilient channel system would block more of the impact sound.
I won’t name them but there seems to be only one company in Ireland selling soundproofing materials like this online. They don’t have the Reductoclip on their site but I’ve heard they’ll be stocking it in a few weeks.
Has anyone installed a similar system to this before? Are you happy with it?
If you know a good company that does residential installations in Cork let me know, I could be persuaded to get it done professionally.
13 comments
You’d wonder how a brand new house has such poor soundproofing if you can hear them that easy. I live in a semi detached house built in the late 90s. Neighbours make normal amount of noise but you can still hear them walk upstairs, open and close cupboard doors etc. we obviously do soundproofing very badly for mass produced housing.
The only method better than that is offsetting the resilient channels on timber batons, filling the gaps with rock wool. That’s 120mm of space lost I think
I just wish the soundproofing store delivered to Ireland, no one here does it that good or cheap.
If you haven’t already YouTube this guy
gosforth handyman soundproofing
I wouldn’t be concerned about their voices traveling across that block wall you are hearing impact resonance.
Do you think you might be going a bit overboard? I’m not sure if the complete construction but I suspect you will still be getting flanking transmission through the floor after this install
When you hear the banging does it feel like it’s the wall making the sound or does the floor vibrate a bit?
I don’t know anything about this wall system so I won’t comment on it, other than to day that retroactive soundproofing is generally difficult, even for professionals. If it’s impact noise, careful installation is key to ensure everything is isolated. How your describing this system doesn’t sound too bad in theory, but I’m hugely sceptical of anything claiming to be a DIY method of retroactive soundproofing.
What I will say, is that you have to also think about your flanking paths. What is the ceiling above the wall? Is this the only shared wall? What about upstairs? You can build the most perfectly acoustically isolated wall and it won’t be worth much at all if the noise can just travel into the other room via another path.
That type of construction of g to he party wall is useless at sound deadening but it seems to be compliant with the building regs
Have done some DIY recording studio stuff in the past, before commercial options were available. Different sounds are composed of different frequencies. Higher frequencies (HF) have less energy than Lower Frequencies(LF).
The sounds that you are hearing will generally be LF (duller/muffled) if not you have a direct transfer of air from the adjoining property. Most LF transfer is from direct acoustic coupling, i.e. the vibration of materials on one side of the wall transfers to the other side inducing vibrations into the air/surfaces that we can hear and feel.
The reductoclip works to reduce the transfer through the walls, however you will still get coupling at the ceiling and floor. The %gain is hard to determine and is dependent on the intensity of the source noise and the disturbance being considerable for one or both parties.
You could just pull the plasterboard off your existing wall, put a noise rated wall insulation in, seal it with noise rated plasterboard, and sandwich another layer on top, put rubber strips under new batons for a second layer of insulation and a second layer of noise rated plasterboards. Seal any holes on the middle layer where cables are coming through.
As another approach, have you tried using a white noise generator to have a consistent low level noise while you sleep, this is a cheap and easy way to mask noise during the night.
You need a survey from an acoustic engineer to know what needs to be done and how much it will cost. Otherwise you will dump a load of money into modifying your home for it to do precisely jack shit.
Egg cartons are your friend
Well thank god you’re not talking about fucking foam.
Dense materials stop sound.
I’ve seen a 5.1 cinema room use exactly what your talking about.
2 sheets with acoustic sealant.
I’ve always been told doing anything to the walls is useless unless you’re cutting back the floor joists.
Have a look at the gypsum white book, it’s available free online and has a lot of information about plasterboard partitions.
Before you go spending loads of money lining your wall with a system that possibly won’t improve much check behind your skirting board and above the ceiling. Does the block wall go right up to the underside of your roof tiles? Pack the gap at the top with rockwool, even adding extra insulation in your roof will help noise transfer, if it’s coming directly through a 9 inch block wall I think you’d be wasting money adding liners, you shouldn’t be getting much more than a bit of impact noise through a 9 inch block.
The problem with the solution in the video is that you could be retrofitting one area, where in fact it’s another area that’s causing the issue. As others have said, get an acoustic engineer involved. As the house is recently built, you should have all the construction information and they can run a model to work out the best, most economical solution.
As someone who works in construction, and has done a few projects where acoustics were the driver (theatres, music studios etc.), I can tell that it requires a good design _and_ good execution. It’s all well and good to specify a specialist acoustic wall-tie or insulation, only for the contractor to go for the cheaper, non-specialist stuff. I’ve even had a project halted on site because it was found the contractor was using the wrong (cheaper) wall-ties in the party wall. I wouldn’t be surprised if this is your issue. Unfortunately there’s no practical way to fix it once it’s constructed, but an acoustic engineer will be best placed to remedy the problem.
Any people I’ve gotten in to quote for soundproofing have said that you shouldn’t apply any hardware to the party wall which it looks like that video is doing
Also if you look into it, there’s fuck all you can do about impact noise without serious construction work unfortunately. Airborne will be dampened by adding mass, once you do it right.
I did loads of research, paid 10k to a firm and to be honest it didnt really work which is just depressing. Happy to PM you the name of the company so you can avoid them.
Edit: new builds are meant to be acoustically rated to a certain level. If you get a sound test to demonstrate this wasnt done you may be able to get your builder to rectify.