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All houses make noise, and those noises can be useful in diagnosing and addressing potential problems. But if your house is driving you crazy with all its creaking and groaning, it’s time to look into ways you can quiet the house down.
You could do a gut renovation to make the place absolutely soundproof, but if you don’t have a spare fortune to spend on the effort, you still have a lot of relatively simple, affordable options to try out, based on what’s making those noises in the first place.
Check your decibels
First, you’ll need some data to work with—and you’ll have to identify exactly what’s causing noise in your house. While some sources of noise will be obvious, using a simple decibel meter (or an app on your phone) to check noise levels from room to room will give you a more specific action plan.
Average room noise is considered to be between 30 and 50 decibels (dB), and any noise above 70dB is considered harmful—but noise sensitivity is subjective. Walk around and make a note of any spots where there’s a jump in noise levels and look into the source of the noise.
Quiet down your appliances
One of the main sources of noise in your home are your appliances. Washers, dryers, dishwashers—everything that makes our lives easier also generates noise, and sometimes a lot of it. Most appliances operate with noise levels between 50 and 70 dB, so having several running at once can create a lot of indoor noise pollution.
You can take a few simple steps to reduce that noise:
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Choose quieter appliances. Different appliances have different decibel ratings, so you can target quieter appliances next time you’re replacing something. You can sometimes find this in a product’s specifications, or you can look for appliances that are Quiet Mark-certified.
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Check the balance. Washing machines and other appliances that have moving internal parts need to be balanced and level—if they’re unbalanced they can shake and make more noise than they should. Grab a level and check that everything is balanced. You can usually adjust the feet of the appliance to level it out.
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Use anti-vibration pads. Available in a variety of sizes, anti-vibration pads absorb the appliance’s vibration, reducing the noise it makes.
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Install wall cladding. Hanging fabric or soundproofing materials on the walls around your appliances can help absorb noise and keep it from being conducted through the walls to other areas of the house.
Check your furnace
If your furnace is noisy, it might be worth it to bring in an HVAC professional to take a look at it. There are some simple things you can try that might make it run quieter, however:
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Adjust the fan speed. Turning the fan speed down might be all that’s needed to eliminate whining or “howling” in a furnace.
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Clean it. Your furnace, filters, and the vents it connects to can become clogged with dust, which can make it run noisier than usual. Cleaning the whole system as thoroughly as you can might eliminate extra noise.
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Inspect your ductwork. Take a look at the ducts where you can, especially where they connect together. Any gaps or holes can cause whistling or other noise, so plugging them up with some foil sealer tape can make a big difference in noise levels.
Add rugs and carpeting
You might not want to carpet the entire house, but area rugs (or even carpet tiles) can offer some of the same benefits, muffling the sounds of people walking around the space. To enhance the benefits, put an extra-thick rug pad underneath to get as much sound absorption as possible out of your floor covering.
Place pads under furniture
While you’re contemplating how much noise your floors are transmitting, don’t forget to put padding under your furniture where practical. You don’t walk under your couch or bed, but the bare floor under there can still act as a conductor, spreading noise to other areas of the home. A rug or pad under those pieces can add just a bit more soundproofing.
Secure your pipes
If one source of noise in your house is rattling pipes, either when you run the hot water (called “water hammering”) or when your heat cycles, you can reduce or eliminate that noise in two ways:
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Secure the pipes. Pipes that knock and bang inside the walls might just need to be secured. This isn’t a difficult job to DIY (but usually does involve opening your walls). Alternatively, you can have a plumber install a water hammer arrester, which should solve the problem.
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Install pressure-reducing valves (PRV). A PRV will regulate the water and air pressure in your pipes, which can reduce or eliminate hammering and banging. This isn’t exactly cheap (it can run you more than $600 if you hire a plumber to install one), but it might be worth it.
Soundproof wall plates
If something in your home is making noise, your home itself can act as one big sound conductor—your walls act almost like speakers, bringing noise from other rooms. This is especially true if they’re not insulated. You might not want to (or be able to) stuff insulation into them, but you can easily blunt some of the noise traveling through those walls by adding some noise-absorbing gaskets to outlets and light switches.
Behind those wall plates are holes in your walls, which makes it easy for noise to find its way into the room. By adding seals around those plates you can cut down the noise that makes it through. If you’re a little handier, you can also apply putty around the electrical boxes in the room, which will also blunt any sounds before they can invade the space.
Upgrade your doors
Like your walls, doors can act as conductors of sound, ferrying noise from outside the room right to your ears. If your interior doors are hollow, the effect is even stronger, so swapping those out for solid-core doors can help make your home quieter. Gaps under the door can also allow sound to seep through from outside, so adding a simple sweep to the bottom to close off this gap can give your door an extra boost of soundproofing ability.
Silence your creaking floors
Even if you put down rugs and pads, floors that creak and squeak as you walk on them will still add to the overall noise level in your home. The good news is that you probably don’t need professional help or even any power tools to shush those floors. A few things you can do include:
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Lubricate. If your hardwood floors are creaking, you can apply a dry lubricant like powdered graphite or even talcum powder. Just work it into the seams between floorboards where you hear a squeak, cover the area with a cloth, and walk on for a bit. Repeat the process until the squeak is gone.
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Shim. If you have access to the underside of the floor, you can look to see if there’s a gap between the subfloor and the joist. If there is, inserting a shim or two to eliminate movement might solve the noise problem. You can also try driving a screw from either above or below to secure the floor. If driving it from above, use a trim screw and sink it below the surface of the floor so you can fill the hole with wood filler. If driving it from below, make sure the screw is short enough not to pop out on the surface of the floor.
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Brace. If there is a pronounced gap or a lot of movement between your joists and subfloor, you can brace the floor with a 2×4 cut to fit between the joists. Attach it so that it’s slightly higher than the joists, compensating for the gap and eliminating subfloor movement.
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For tile floors, you can check that the tiles are firmly adhered to the subfloor and re-apply any loose tiles. Then look for gaps around the edges of the floor and caulk them. This will help eliminate any tile shifts that might be causing the squeak.
Mitigate noises from settling
If your home makes groaning or cracking noises, it usually gets classified as “settling,” the process of a house sinking into its foundation and the materials it’s built out of compensating for shifts and compression. This is pretty natural and affects most houses at one time or another, although severe settling can indicate a foundation problem.
But those settling noises might also be caused by humidity and temperature, which can cause wood and other materials to expand and contract, resulting in cracking, popping, and groaning noises. Managing the humidity and temperature fluctuations in the home might reduce or even eliminate these noises.
Service your heating system
Noisy radiators
If you have steam radiators in the house, you know that they can sound like an off-key brass band marching through your nightmares. You can try some simple DIY fixes to quiet them down:
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Shim it. A banging, clanging radiator can be caused by water settling at the bottom of the radiator. Elevating it slightly so it tips toward the boiler can eliminate that problem.
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Replace the air vent. A radiator that whistles and burps every time the heat rises might just need a new air vent. This is pretty cheap and easy to do DIY.
A loud forced air furnace
If you have forced-air heat that sounds like a battleship leaving port every time it fires up, you might be able to quiet it down without a major project:
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Duct liners. Having fiberglass duct liners installed in the ducts can dampen noise caused by vibration and rattling, and inhibit noise conductivity.
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Anti-vibration pads under the furnace itself can also help reduce the noise.
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Replace the filter. A dirty air filter can cause the furnace to work harder, which can lead to booming or banging noises. You can also try opening your home’s supply vents as well.
If these steps don’t help, your furnace’s motor may be the cause, either due to low lubrication levels, a failing belt, or some other mechanical cause. Your best bet will be to call a professional to take a look.