Sound insulation for basement man cave

Discussion in 'Audio Hardware' started by ukrules, Oct 17, 2016.

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  1. ukrules

    ukrules Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    Kentucky
    For the past year or so, I have spent a lot of time enjoying my 2-channel rig in the basement man cave. However, the "mechanicals" in the unfinished part can be loud (water heater and furnace). There is no insulation or drywall on the other side of the walls. Are there any suggestions of the type of insulation or drywall I should install to achieve optimal sound reduction?
     
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  2. Dennis0675

    Dennis0675 Hyperactive!

    Location:
    Ohio
    Are you trying to finish the basement or just add some treatments?
     
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  3. head_unit

    head_unit Senior Member

    Location:
    Los Angeles CA USA
    Well, first off, some pictures would help enormously. And some wild idea about how much you want to spend. Consider also if it is easier to enclose the mechanicals instead of the room.

    If you REALLY want to cut the noise, you'd want offset-stud walls, or even 2 skinny walls with a gap in between, not touching at all, so there is no direct wood contact path to transmit vibration. Then basically you need thicker and thicker insulation to stop lower and lower frequencies. For lows, you'd usually need some kind of heavy product, like mass loaded vinyl, to reduce the vibration of the panels.

    There are so many ways for sound to transmit, it is tricky. You can do all of the above and still have noise sneaking in through little holes, through HVAC ducts, any kind of gap. So execution and care is probably as important as the materials. Think about noise like a TV coming in from another room through an open door. Now you close the door almost all the way-sound reduced, but still audible. Closing the door completely makes a big difference, so ya gotta kill those little air gaps.
     
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  4. ukrules

    ukrules Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    Kentucky
    The basement is already finished 75%. There is a door to the other 25% where the water heater and furnace are located (along with all our "junk"). The walls between are just drywall and studs (no insulation or drywall on the unfinished side. I would like to reduce the noise generated from the water heater and furnace so it's not so much heard in the finished part.

    The water heater is much louder than the furnace. It has a loud fan that runs while it is heating up.
     
  5. davmar77

    davmar77 I'd rather be drummin'...

    Location:
    clifton park,ny
  6. Tullman

    Tullman Senior Member

    Location:
    Boston MA
    Double walls that don't contact each other in any way and double doors that don't contact each other.
     
    Last edited: Oct 20, 2016
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  7. timind

    timind phorum rezident

    If it were my basement, I would put insulation on the other side of the wall and then drywall it.
     
  8. Eduardo Denaro

    Eduardo Denaro Forum Resident

    Location:
    Minnesota
    I'm a spray foam insulator by trade. And that is by far your best bet at stopping the most sound. You want to give Priority Insulation a call out of Cincinnati. You want open cell foam insulation for sound in your walls. You want to make sure they block the floor joist cavities with foam that go above the finished portion of the basement. Sound travels in waves. So make sure they put acoustical caulking on all the joints. Then you can sheetrock the backside of the wall with some sort of sound channel and it'll look good and perform wonderfully too. Trust me, I do it for a living.
     
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  9. Tullman

    Tullman Senior Member

    Location:
    Boston MA
    Double walls using plaster board and fiber glass insulation will be cheaper and more effective, especially if your floor is concrete.
     
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  10. ukrules

    ukrules Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    Kentucky
    I am looking for bang-for-the-buck to start. Actually the water heater is the main culprit...perhaps a silent one of those if that is possible.
     
  11. Bingo Bongo

    Bingo Bongo Music gives me Eargasms

    Location:
    Ottawa, Canada
    I would put insulation on the other side of the wall but NO drywall! Cheap and easy and more importantly "much more quiet”.
     
  12. PMC7027

    PMC7027 Forum Hall Of Fame

    What find of water heater do you have that has a fan and makes noise? All I've ever had are gas water heaters that just have a burner below the tank to heat the water. No fan or noise.
     
  13. timind

    timind phorum rezident

    Why would it be quieter without the extra layer of drywall? I'm not a builder or acoustics expert, but it seems counter intuitive to me.
     
  14. Eduardo Denaro

    Eduardo Denaro Forum Resident

    Location:
    Minnesota
    There's a lot of people on here who get paid to sound proof several million dollar houses I guess.
     
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  15. Bingo Bongo

    Bingo Bongo Music gives me Eargasms

    Location:
    Ottawa, Canada
    He's trying to do it on the cheap. Drywall ups the price considerably, but insulation does muffle the sound quite nicely.
     
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  16. formu_la

    formu_la I'm not a robot

    Location:
    Toronto, Canada
    To build double wall is a challenge probably. There is such thing as sound insulation drywall (I have it in the ceiling of my cave). Not cheap, but gives an improvement. Won't help much for low bass though.
     
  17. formu_la

    formu_la I'm not a robot

    Location:
    Toronto, Canada
    Standard drywall is as cheap as it gets, (unless you hire expensive contractor.;)).
     
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  18. Tullman

    Tullman Senior Member

    Location:
    Boston MA
    How much would it cost to fix the OP's problem using your pro materials and labor? Just curious.
     
  19. TVC15

    TVC15 Forum Resident

    Location:
    New Jersey
    Which would be expensive. Main thing would be insulation and drywall.

    Your water heater and furnace will need room to 'breathe' however. When I walled off my utilities for a home theater space we set it up to pull fresh air from the crawl space. Otherwise you'll still need vents in the walls -- which will be noisier.
     
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  20. Dennis0675

    Dennis0675 Hyperactive!

    Location:
    Ohio
    If we are just talking about the noise from a hot water tank fan, save some money and just turn up the volume
     
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  21. If your 25% is only dry-walled on one side, just get some Roxul safe n sound to insulate the wall and put a door on it. Cheap and fast and you should be able to do it yourself.
     
  22. Agitater

    Agitater Forum Resident

    Location:
    Toronto
    Seems like you've a domestic hot water heater with a power vent. They can be noisy. If it's a rental unit, call the supplier and get a quiet heater instead. If the type of house and installation requires a power vent, you'll have to ensure an adequate fresh air supply before yous start insulating and sealing up the furnace room. Keep in mind also that unless you've already got a high efficiency furnace with it's own fresh air supply and it's own exhaust vent, you'll have to provide a fresh air supply for it as well. Any competent heating contractor should be able to sort you out for a few hundred dollars.

    To isolate the furnace room, you'll also need an insulated slab door with a snug-sealing sweep and jamb seals. You'll need to tack sheet insulator (closed cell foam sheet works well. It's laid onto of exposed studs and wraps into each cavity. You have to extend the stud wall to the underside of the joists above, and install solid bridgers between the joists to effectively bring the stud wall to the underside of the main floor. The furnace room side of the solid bridgers has to be sheeted too. Then lay acoustic batting between each stud and bridger against the sheeting. Close it all in with 1/2" drywall. Tape, prime and paint. To ensure an effective job, make sure you remove and re-route any light switches and outlets on the wall(s) in question or you'll have leakage. You'll get a 10-15- db abatement, not more than that.

    Another thing you can do is to have your heating contractor provide an override switch in a convenient location in the basement so that you can prevent the furnace from coming on. That will result in increased heating costs because although it'll be quieter when the furnace doesn't cycle on, if the house cools more than it usually does between furnace cycles the furnace will have to run longer to bring it up to the temp setting in colder weather. If you've got a typical furnace installation right now, there's already a shut off switch near the furnace.

    You can't put that kind of switch on a water heater because you never want the interior water temp to drop below the temp needed to kill bacteria. Frankly, most contractor who are the business of dealing with acoustic/noise issues always start with getting rid of unwanted noise sources first. So I'd take a page out their book and start with a quiet water heater. If your existing heater is 15 or more years old or you're not happy with the existing heater's capacity, going for a quiet unit of the correct capacity is justifiable expense. The whole house will be quieter. You may find, after getting a quiet hot water heater that you really don't have to do much else.

    Those heaters can be startling when they cycle on - even when you're expecting it. I hate the things. I ripped 64 of them out of a townhouse condo project in Hamilton (west of Toronto) in the late '90s. They were only ten years old at that point, but almost every one of the owners was continually complaining about being woken up at night on a fairly regular basis. The condo corporation owned the heaters, so I juggled the capital budget and advised the board of directors to bite the bullet. They did, and ended up with quiet condos and a lot of happy owners and a much-reduced turnover rate.

    You may still have to insulate the furnace room. Mid and high efficiency furnaces themselves have start up fan cycles that clear the collector box of residual gases before firing the heat exchanger and beginning the heating cycle itself. They're not as noisy as power vents though. Get a quiet water heater first.
     
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  23. Larry I

    Larry I Senior Member

    Location:
    Washington, D.C.
    I have seen/heard rooms that have been isolated with relative ease by using double layers of sheet rock with "Green Glue" between the sheets. You can do even more with sound isolation panels, instead of sheet rock, but, in any case, Green Glue should be used because it is VERY effective, even with low frequency sounds.
     
  24. F1 Power

    F1 Power Well-Known Member

    Location:
    Sweden
    Just adding 4" insulation on the back side will cut away high frequencies above 5000hz, but only make a slight damping on sounds below with a liner increase as the frequency drops downwards.
    What you actually want to achieve is a sound absorbing dubbel drywall. To achieve this you need to understand three characteristics of sound energy.

    1. Sound speed
    Sound waves travels at different speed depending on the density of the material, causing the wavelength to stretch och shortened. The higher the speed the longer the wavelength, and vice versa.
    Sound in water travels 5 times faster than in free air. Wood and concrete is 10 times and Plaster boards is about 20 times faster.
    Sound speed in Cotton, wool, foam and other soft material is about half of free air pending on density of course.

    This means that hard materials transfer more sound than soft ones.

    2. Sound pressure
    Sound pressure is logarithmically reduced by half every time the distance is dubbled.
    The longer/more time a soundwave has to travel, more of it's energy it loses on the way causing energy reduction.
    The reduction is actually friction in the material converting moving energy in to static heat energy, and so absorption acures.
    So if the speed is lowerd and the wavelength is shortened, the lesser of a distance is needed to reduce sound energy.

    This is the way soft material damps sound by slowing the speed down and thus shortening the wavelength, forcing it to a longer travel time for a certain distance. The damping factor is pending on frequency, were as low frequencies damps lesser.

    3. Reflection
    Soft material absorbs more of the energy and reflect less, as in opposition to hard material that absorbs less, thus reflects more energy.
    Reflected sound wave energy counteracts other sound waves and cussing more ore less cancelation.

    Construction solution
    By using a combination of soft and hard materials and air in a dubbel wall you can easily stop almost all sound from the water heater and furness to enter your music room.

    Described from water heater room to music room.
    Start with a plaster bord, hard surface very reflectivein. Next an OSB wood board that is softer and thus damping waves transferred through the plaster board. Next the 3" stud structure with rock wool isolation, to slow down sound speed and absorb energy.
    Next you lave an inch of air space to prevent mechanical transfer to the second wall.

    Second wall is OSB wood board to reflect back any sound that comes through the first wall into cancelling additional sound.
    Next a 3" stud structure and rock wool for absorption.
    Finally OSB wood board and a plasterboard for finnish.

    This wall will tensions and compress the sound waves, damping, deflecting, defusing and absorbing them. The combination of material with different density is very effective.
    Just make sure there's no gaps and holes along the floor, side walls or sealing.

    Good luck.
     
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  25. ukrules

    ukrules Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    Kentucky
    Good advice from all! I am thinking of seeing about a quieter water heater fan.
     
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