Top 5 Strategies for Effective Noise Reduction at Home

After a wonderful New Year’s celebration with plenty of food, revelry and drink, your first instinct is probably to have a nice lie-in. Your dog emerges from under the bed, having finally recovered from the shell shock of the fireworks of the night before and curls up by your feet.

Unfortunately for you, Santa gifted the kids next door a drum kit which has in turn been regifted to you as a throbbing headache. It’s moments like this that make you wish for just a bit of peace and quiet. 

Taking the time to reduce the noise pollution of your home can have a plethora of benefits. Outside of the obvious benefit of a quiet home, it can also reduce risk of hearing loss, heart disease, high blood pressure and stress.

Here are our top five ways to reduce noise at home and improve your quality of life. At the very least, you’ll be able to tune out the tuneless renditions of Auld Lang Syne from your neighbours!*

* If you are that neighbour, then your neighbours will thank you if you adopt any of these home improvements.

5. Sound Decoration Tips

Decoration is more than a simple aesthetic choice. Hardwood flooring is a very popular choice in homes, but carpet is significantly better at reducing noises like footsteps (25 to 34dB better!) 

Thankfully you don’t have to replace all of your lovely flooring to improve the noise reduction of your room. Adding soft furnishings such as rugs and cushions can absorb some of the sounds of a room.

For blocking out external noise, heavy curtains can be a significant improvement over blinds. The cost can be a reduction in the amount of natural light, but for some rooms in your house this might not be a big factor. 

If you’re a big reader or you’re committed to pretending to be one, bookshelves are an incredible way to absorb sounds. Set them up against particularly noisy walls, fill them with books and enjoy the newfound silence. Aptly, these will create a great environment for reading!

4. Change Rooms

Your home will evolve in many wonderful ways as you continue to live there. If one of your rooms is starting to feel like the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party, it may be a good idea to change the purpose of this room.

If the room you made an office is a little close to the neighbours with the excitable new puppy, perhaps it’s time to switch places with your children’s playroom. If it’s one wall in particular that’s disturbing you, consider moving the room around to give you a level of separation.

The change can be as big or small as you’d like, but it never hurts to get a fresh perspective on things.

3. Replace Your Doors

Your front door is a bustling hive of activity. Friends, family and visitors alike all make use of this portal into your home. When the door finally closes, the last thing you want is to hear the world outside.

Consider a composite front door. Many doors are made of uPVC which is a perfectly usable budget option with a decent soundproofing and insulation. Composite doors, by virtue of being approximately 10 mm thicker, provide a much more substantial benefit to protect against noise and even have a side benefit in thermal insulation.

If noise is a big problem, you might also want to consider replacing your internal doors too. Lightweight, hollow core doors are great for visual privacy but not quite as good at acoustic dampening. They are generally the cheapest option and best suited for 

While solid core doors are more expensive, the added weight is an incredible boon to your soundproofing while still remaining easy to open. The effect of noise reduction is cumulative, so the more doors between the source of the noise and you, the less you’ll be able to hear it.

2. Wall Insulation & Soundproofing

If you have a house constructed after 1920 then it’s likely that you have a cavity wall. This means that there’s effectively two separate walls with a gap in between. Polystyrene cavity wall insulation is a popular choice for improving the thermal insulation of a property, however by increasing the mass of the wall it also helps reduce noise slightly. 

For an effective solution in stud walls and brick walls, consider acoustic insulation made of sound absorbing materials. The shapes, size and designs of these can vary, but you can find one that suits the aesthetics of your room while reducing the amount of noise coming into your home (and out of it too!)

These methods can be attempted by you if you’re particularly handy. For more complicated noise insulation jobs we’d recommend getting a professional in for the job.

1. Secondary Glazing

Secondary Glazing offers an unparalleled performance when it comes to acoustic dampening. It far outshines other glass products with an effective noise level reduction of up to 80%.

Double or triple glazing usually has a gap of less than 20 mm and each pane has the same mass. This means that there is some noise reduction but it’s barely better than a single pane of glass. 

In the case of secondary glazing, the gap between the two panes is upwards of 100 mm. Due to the difference in mass, the resonance of the sound is reduced by a much larger factor.

The end result being that correctly installed secondary glazing can reduce noise levels by up to 54dB! By comparison, most double and triple can only achieve 35dB and single panes by themself achieve around 29dB.

Besides this are the obvious benefits to thermal insulation (65% improvement compared to double glazing’s 55%), and enhanced security (including options for PAS24) with our resilient aluminium frames and toughened glass. 

Cut out all the unwanted noise and focus on the things that matter most to you. Embrace the opportunity to take up noisy hobbies like learning an instrument, carpentry, or just listening to the TV on really, really loud. Make your home a haven again this year.