Reducing Exterior Noise

A common situation for our customers is excessive noise entering their homes from outside. Exterior noise sources abound, with the most common being aircraft and traffic. The first important issue of dealing with exterior noise stems from these common noise sources - both are rich in low frequency noise. So, when attempting to reduce exterior noise, low frequency noise will have to be considered.

The second component of the overall situation that affects exterior noise is the presence of windows and doors. At some frequencies, the windows and doors will let more noise in than the walls. And this is important, because the barrier between you and the noise outside is only as good as its weakest link. The graph below shows the typical performance of an exterior door, and the performance of a typical exterior wall.

If you aren't familiar with graphs like this, that's ok. All it shows is that at some frequencies, the wall performs worse than the doors (or windows), and at others the doors (or windows) will be the lower performers.

Because - except in situations where extremely high performance doors and windows are utilized - the walls are not the limiting factor at high frequencies, the best upgrade you could make to the walls would focus on low frequency noise.

The low frequency resonance problems of common walls are Green Glue specialty.

For the upgrading of existing constructions, or for constructions where many thousands of dollars are not available for exotic windows and doors, much can still be done. For these applications, it is important to put your money where the most improvement can be had. In the graph below we show calculations of the performance of various improvements to this overall assembly, and the net final result.

Performance of adding different types of soundproofing materials

Unless you intend to do some major rennovations with significant improvements to the windows and doors, just adding a layer of Green and some drywall will get you almost all of the way to the best performance you can attain - and a very good level of performance it is.

If you want an extremely low level of noise, this is more than possible. You will have to consider deep, very high performance windows, and you may require specialized doors as well. A simple staggered stud wall with Green Glue will allow you to reach the performance of the best windows or doors without being an extremely expensive construction.