Tips for soundproofing to avoid road noise – DSP 23

Soon after you open, you might realize that you’ve gotten a lot of the same complaint: The float was great, but I heard all this rumbling.

Odds are, your floaters are hearing one of two things — traffic on the road outside or their very hungry tummy.

If it’s the latter, feed them some post float snacks and tea. If the former, what can you do?

Aside from difficult and expensive projects, like building new walls or lobbying for the removal of cars from municipal streets, it turns out there are some pretty simple and cheap solutions that will block traffic noise.

Like inexpensive rubber pucks.

Pucks?

Puck yeah. Listen above or read below to learn more.

FTS Blog — The Construction Secret to Soundproofing: Storage Between Float Rooms

Listen to Just the Audio

Transcription of this episode… (in case you prefer reading)

Ashkahn: Alright, what’s our question today?

Graham: Alright, our question today is, “Help, I’ve just opened but I’m getting at least a couple of complaints a day about sound in the tanks, probably from traffic. What are my options?”

Ashkahn: Traffic sound, huh?

Graham: The old traffic sound. An oldie but a goodie.

Ashkahn: Yeah, so there are some options, that’s the nice thing. They range from the basic to the extreme.

Graham: Yep. Basic is just, tear down your entire center, rebuild it somewhere else-

Ashkahn: Start over.

Graham: Start from scratch.

Ashkahn: Start a new life. Change your name.

So probably where I would start is vibration isolation pads, because that’s the cheapest and an option that doesn’t alter your building.

Graham: So here’s the deal: If you’re hearing traffic noise inside your float tank and your float tank isn’t already sitting on top of some kind of acoustical dampener, then you have a really easy solution that is very likely to eliminate most of that traffic noise coming in, which is great. And that’s what Ashkahn said, which is the vibration isolation pads. Or vibration isolation mat.

At Float On, we tend to prefer the pads because you have less points of contact with the ground, which we’ll get into when we explain these. But basically there’s varying levels of degree that you can go to to soundproof vibration coming in to your float tank from the floor.

Ashkahn: These things are, first of all, not that expensive. We usually use the three by three inch pucks. We’ll put —how many of those under a tank?

Graham: About 11.

Ashkahn: So, we’ll put 11 of those under a tank. So you’re talking about $33. And then you also need to usually connect them to a rigid surface — usually what we use is a plastic material, high density polyethylene, or an HTPE board.

Graham: I should say that’s opposed to plywood or something like that. Eventually, that plywood will get damaged by salt water and just not be feasible anymore, so we’ve switched to using this plastic material.

Ashkahn: So you’re taking these vibration isolation pads, and I guess I’ll start with what they do. The whole idea is that they dampen vibration going into your float tank. They’re really made more for doing the kind of reverse of that. They’re made for putting under machinery that creates a lot of vibration, to stop the vibration from getting to the rest of the building. You’ll often see these on HVAC and stuff like that, big air conditioner units on a roof.

Graham: We stuck them underneath crazy shoe machines next door, when there was a shoe shop right next to Float On.

Ashkahn: But they’re basically these pucks that have alternating materials in layers. The ones we use just go rubber and then a layer of this kind of EVA plastic is what they call it, and another layer of rubber. And just because the sound has to move through those different densities of materials, it changes the sound wave every time it hits one of those places where it needs to shift densities. By doing that you’re kind of dispersing the sound, because sound waves don’t like having to continuously go through different layers like that.

Graham: And it’s actually amazing how well these eliminate vibration sound coming in, which I think is why Ashkahn and I jumped immediately to this as a solution when we heard the word traffic noise. The traffic noise that you’re hearing isn’t even the horns coming from outside, I can almost promise you.

Ashkahn: Yeah, it’s not the engines.

Graham: It’s this low rumble coming from, often, really big trucks, motorcycles. That deep bass that just kind of goes through the street and into your concrete foundation or wooden foundation, up into your tanks, is very difficult to block out by any other means than actually just trying to decouple your float tank from the floor and somehow reduce those vibrations before they make it up into it.

In addition to that, not only traffic, but those are in general the hardest noises to block out. There’s a chance that separate from the traffic noises coming in that make people acutely object, you might also just end up with a much more soundproof environment. It might be immediately noticeable, if you get these layers of vibration isolation pads under your tank, even just with the little background hums and things like that that you hear.

Ashkahn: So yeah, you basically get these, and like I said, they’re just three inch by three inch pucks. That means that when the whole float tank is sitting on just 11 of those, it’s not really touching the ground in that many spots, so just the least amount of surface area possible is also going to help reduce the vibrations that can actually go up and get into your float tank. But because there’s just a few of them, then they create these kind of points of all the weight just sitting on those certain points. Sometimes the base of the float tank or the fiberglass might not be quite strong enough to have all of it’s weight on just 11 small points like that, so we’ll take the pucks and we’ll attach them to a big sheet of HTPE, a kind of plastic material, and we’ll cut that to the size of the float tank and then the float tank will sit on top of that. That kind of distributes the weight over it, but it still means the whole float tank is only touching the ground on those points that are made up of these vibration isolation pads.

One important thing to not forget is that you have to do that to your filtration system too, because the sound’s always going to go through the weakest spot. So, if you have your whole float tanks sitting on vibration isolation pads, and it’s all doing great and nice, but your pump is sitting on the ground and your pump is connected straight into your float tank through a pipe, then the sound’s just going to through that way. So you kind of have to do the whole system.

Graham: It’s incredibly easy to spend a ridiculous amount of money on soundproofing and accomplish almost nothing. Again, having your pump sitting on the ground can just ruin all of the time that you’ve just spent putting that vibration isolation stand underneath your float tank.

Similarly, your float tank actually touching your walls is another one to avoid. So have your tanks sitting at least an inch off of your walls, on every side. That’s even true of things like cabin style tanks, where often times you’ll have the exterior paneling kind of butting up and making almost a solid surface. Even that you want to have sitting off the wall, and preferably only filled in with some silicone caulking, or something like that, to make the actual seamless edge. But anywhere where your float tank touches the wall, that’s another place where vibration can come up through your floor, through the studs, through the wall and directly into the float tank. You might find, even putting in a stand, if your float tank’s leaning against a wall, you still get that same traffic noise coming in.

Ashkahn: Yeah, so specifically dealing with traffic noise, this seems to be the solution that often does it for people. It’s not often that I’ll hear a float center does this and still has too much traffic noise. So if this doesn’t work, probably the next step would be just to go outside, buy a giant road closed sign and put it in the street, and just not let anybody drive down that street anymore.

Graham: The City tends to frown on that, but just throw the officials in a float tank and you’re good.

Alright, thanks for the question. We’ll talk to you all tomorrow.

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