Hopefully someone here has had some experience of this…

Just got the keys to a new (20 year old) 3 bed semi, it’s been an unloved house so we need to completely refurbish it over the next month or so.

Was speaking to our neighbour last night and they mentioned that the soundproofing was pretty poor between the houses, I expect that we’ll be noisier then them but I also don’t fancy listening to them shagging when her hubby comes back on leave (currently in the forces).

Since we’re refurbishing i thought i might try and do something about it before we move in. So, I removed a square of plasterboard attached to the party wall and behind it is just breeze block. The plasterboard is dot and dabbed onto it and I have a funny feeling that it’s acoustic plasterboard already.

I was thinking of removing all the plasterboard on the party wall and then re-boarding with more modern, hopefully better spec stuff. I’m either looking at putting up double thick sheets of 15mm Knauf Soundshieled Plus (or equivalent). Or, I’ve also come accross UK Acoustic systems soundboard which is 28mm thick and actually looks like it was designed for proper soundproofing compared to soundproof plasterboard.

The rooms aren’t massive so I cant afford to batten the wall and install anything thicker.

Anyone got any experience in this area?

Unless you do it properly then it’s barely worth doing. You need to insulate against airborne and impact sound. 2 layers of plasterboard may help a little but not much. To do it properly is hard and expensive. One easy ish way for the walls involves fitting resilient bars before the plasterboard so it floats off the wall with very little area for the sound to travel. But that won’t help with transmission through floors and walls. These are difficult because they are solid and retro isolating them is near on impossible. I have designed some offices inside a factory where sound proofing was necessary. I specified a block wall with a 50mm gap then 50mm insulation then resilient bars then 2 layouts of sound reduction plasterboard. Worked very well.

I’d say you need a floating wall ,isolated from any attachment to your existing one.I’ve just built a few for a client and they said it’s made a big difference. The overall depth of new wall was around 125mm which consisted of 50 mm acoustic slabs,floating studwall,with 50mm acoustic slab inbetween studs,then layer of 12.5 soundblock plasterboard then plaster .Sound travels through ‘contact’ points via vibrations.Hard to eradicate all of theses as ceiling and floor joists etc are already in contact but can certainly improve things.You could probably rip of all dot dab as ‘could’ be just acting like a speaker and that would also give you around an extra 25mm depth to play with .

check out double layered plasterboard using Green Glue. People building home cinema’s etc use it.

What we’ve done here on one wall is take it back to brick, stud it out and using 30mm cellotex + expanding foam + air-tightness tape (forget the name of it), you’ll make an air tight wall of dense insulation + double board up and use Green Glue.

(we also have a small house (3.5m wide!) and wanted to make a decent improvement for heat as well as sound)

Thanks for the replies, gives me something to think about. I think i’ll phone a few specialist soundproofing suppliers too and see what they say, im not expecting complete soundproofing, it would just be nice to not have a conversation through the wall.

The dot and dab is accounting for about 15mm. If I go right back to the block, I recon I can get about 50mm to play with before it starts becoming too intrusive. Will check out green glue too!

Cheers

Paul – give us a bell when we get back to work on Tues 3rd January.
http://www.soundreduction.co.uk
01204 380074

I used some sound proofing board in the last house, It had a thick heavy layer in the middle. Each board weighed a bloody ton, took two of us to pick them up. Ours went straight on. They made a tremendous difference, from recognising spoken words to not hearing anything until very loud but just a muffle on our side.