VO-BB - 20 YEARS OLD!

vkuehn

In my new "digs" I will devote an entire (small) room to being a studio. Hardwood floor over a crawl space. I want to start by covering the floor with something that will minimize any noise trying to enter the room via the floor.

I am thinking a "sandwich" of multiple materials. The bottom layer should protect the floor so the next owner of the property won't find this scarred and stained hardwood floor. (I'm sure that will be at least 30 or 40 years from now! Rolls Eyes

I don't want the sandwich to be too spongy to walk on; I don't want furniture and chairs sinking into the surface. I would like for my sandwich to be a bit thinner than the floors typically used in DawBox and other booth projects.

The neighborhood is reasonably quiet so I don't have to come up with a MIRACLE design. But every little bit of noise stopped is always a good thing.

What materials should I be looking at?

Scott Pollak · Posted: Sat May 14, 2016 6:22 am Post subject:

Sometimes we overthink things, Vernon. I, too, have my studio setup in a small former bedroom in our 1899 farmhouse. The room is roughly 8 feet by 10 feet, with a hardwood floor. I got a throw rug from Walmart and put it on the floor, and it works fine. Why not start out with the simplest and most cost-effective solution, see how it works once you get in there, and if you need something beyond that then try the next step?
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Bruce · Posted: Sat May 14, 2016 9:40 am Post subject:

Agreed. Try a relatively dense (heavy) rug(s) to cover much of the floor. Add foam padding under it(them) if the rug alone doesn't do the job, but I'll bet that's not needed.

Of course if you have mating raccoons living in the crawl space, all bets are off.

B
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vkuehn · Posted: Sat May 14, 2016 10:25 am Post subject:

Bish · Posted: Sat May 14, 2016 11:27 am Post subject:

OK... this is where I admit to culture shock. I had to look up radon mitigation, and thence down the rat-hole of radon itself. So... as far as I understand it, the house is atop some natural decaying uranium-238 deposits that cause a radon-222 out-gassing and build-up to something in excess of 4 pCi/L (the nominal "max acceptable" level). While (supposedly) no level of radon is safe, it is accepted as a background issue with mitigation for "hot-spots". Radon induced lung cancer kills 21,000 per year.

I had never even heard of this crap before! I absolutely accept that it's a natural thing and not something to run-away from... but dang! I would!

Oh... and to circle back around to the floor covering... lead. Half and inch of solid lead!
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vkuehn · Posted: Sat May 14, 2016 1:29 pm Post subject:

Bish, welcome to the supersensitve world we are living in today. Southern Wisconsin and Norther Illinois have a substantial limestone base under the surface layers of soils so in the area where I am going, virtually EVERYONE has a Radon issue... whether they know it or not. The lady I am buying the house from has lived there for 12 or 14 years and she has no obvious health issues and did not know about the Radon. Testing today has become common, routine and I guess for some transactions, mandatory. Yes 4 is the threshold. They put the monitor in my house for 48 hours or so and it had an average reading of 5.0 and a peak reading of 6.5.

The little fan that will be installed will be little more capable than the "muffin fans" that keep air circulating in our desktop and tower computers. 135 cubic inches per minute, consuming 10 to 20 watts. But for crawling under the house, installing that network of PVC pipes and putting a layer of visqueen or something to cover the surface and force the up-gassed stuff over to the manifold of intack pipes does cost a pretty penny. The inspector estimated 700 to 900 dollars.

My inspector had quite a story to tell about his house that he bought 10 or 15 years ago and how sick they were until they discovered it had a serious Radon problem. (He doesn't sell the evacuation systems so he had no financial reason to try and scare me.)

Conventional wisdom says: Such a little fan and such a low air flow can't be a noise problem, but if I don't push and shove, they will bolt the little fan to the joists under the floor of my studio and run this ugly standpipe/chimney up the exterior wall of my studio space.

I had the Home Inspection guy run the HVAC for a couple of minutes. Boys and girls.... would you like to guess the next challenge that must be tackled?

paulstefano · Posted: Mon May 16, 2016 4:50 am Post subject:

Vern, for your rubber/foam layer try the puzzle piece gym mats I referenced in my post about vibrations. It worked wonders for me to help isolate the booth on my 2nd floor. Also, very easy put down as they are all 2 foot by 2 foot squares. Did I mention cheap?
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vkuehn · Posted: Mon May 16, 2016 6:27 am Post subject:

Paul, thanks for the reminder about the puzzle-piece gym mats. I have a possibility that Scott Pollak has it right... expect little or no problem. But I don't have an old farm house to deal with. I struggled for months to land this house which is one block from busy city bus lines.*** And that same street will be carrying delivery trucks going to retail establishments. Even while I am unloading, I plan to set up a computer and start recording in that room for hours.... just to get a base-line on what is the worst kind of noise and what time of day.

***In a cold, sometimes icy northern city that is crowded and bustling and short of affordable parking in places I want to go, the bus line will be my best friend when I want to go somewhere, (and my worst enemy when I want to record?)

Eddie Eagle · M&M Joined: 23 Apr 2008 Posts: 2393

I've always liked the area rug in Home Depot that have the ultra long shag. If you use them like they are displayed in the store in a hanging fashion you will get good dampening and possibly a bit of insulation in the winter Smile

vkuehn · Posted: Mon May 16, 2016 12:06 pm Post subject:

Scott Pollak · Posted: Mon May 16, 2016 12:51 pm Post subject:

todd ellis · Posted: Mon May 16, 2016 1:38 pm Post subject:

you could look at stall mats
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Jason Huggins · Posted: Tue May 17, 2016 11:19 am Post subject:

+1 on the stall mats. They are super heavy and will surely stop some sound from coming up (providing you completely cover the floor with no gaps. The will also stop the floor from vibrating because they are so heavy. The gym floor mats would not stop any sound and they would compress under the weight of the floor over time, resulting in uneven floor and no more elasticity so they wouldn't decouple anything once they compressed.

If density is what you're looking for, I would try the stall mats for sure. You could probably place a layer or two of OSB over the stall mats (if you needed to) and just set it in there as long as the mats covered the entire floor surface. Those stall mats are heavy as crap...like 100lbs a piece in a 2'x4' sheet.

Maybe treating the underside would be better than treating the floor itself. That way you could build a decoupled ceiling and insulate. Or maybe both, stall mats above with a floor on top of them and then density added to the crawlspace ceiling decoupled with insulation between.

This is all contingent upon NEED. If it's quiet enough, just go with a big rug Smile

I have a radon fan for my basement but the fan itself is outside. I can't hear the fan, but I can hear the vibration that happens as a result of the exhaust vent being mounted to the structure of the house. Decoupling the exhaust vent pipe from the house would probably fix that but it hasn't been enough of an issue that I want to go to the trouble.

ccpetersen · Posted: Tue May 17, 2016 12:10 pm Post subject:

We have radon mitigation in our house and the fan is actually venting to the outside and you can't hear it from inside the garage (where it is installed). It's actually inside the vent pipe (which is thick PVC). It is very, very quiet. See if the contractor can't surround the fan with noise-quieting material and make it vent outside without any noise inside.

c
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Lee Gordon · Posted: Tue May 17, 2016 12:40 pm Post subject:

I have taken numerous steps to isolate the floor of my booth from the (carpeted) floor of the room in which it sits -- 2x4 frame with cavities filled with Roxul Safe 'n Sound, mass-loaded vinyl loosely attached to the top of the joists, a deck made from two layers of ½" MDF with Green Glue in between, and the whole thing mounted on Auralex U-boat floor floaters. And I can still hear street traffic when I'm inside the booth (although I can't say for sure that any of that sound is migrating through the floor and not coming through some other component).

My best advice is to locate your studio on the side of the house that is the farthest away from the traffic.
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