We’ve recently purchased a house that was built in 1982, as a Multi Dwelling Unit.
The plans show that the Intertenancy wall is built as a Firestop Wall, and is made of 200mm thick Masonry Blocks (Vibrapac), 50mm Strapping on top of the blocks, with Batts, and topped off with 9.5mm Gib (on both sides of the wall).
I was wondering what peoples experiences were with this type of wall from this era in terms of Noise Isolation? Concerned with not only sounds coming from the neighbors, but also sending any noise their way.
We are planning on adding an extra layer of 13mm Noiseline Gib once we move in.
My only (admittedly brief) experience was that they’re pretty noise-proof, but extremely loud bass can carry through just about anything.
That’s good to hear!
I think if it gets to the level of extreme bass, that’s a completely different problem :)
As long as we’re not hearing each other day to day, and the occasional bursts or noise I’d be really happy with that.
Had something like this and it was fine but in a late 90s house and in Wellington so the wind covered a lot of noise so YMMV.
On a windless day we could hear only hear the neighbours via the windows - out theirs and in ours. Nothing except a massive party would go through the firewall.
I guess the 90’s and 80’s may have had some different building standards, but hopefully that amount of Noise Proofing still holds true for the 80’s houses too.
The house has double glazed windows. So hopefully that will help a little with the noise through the windows.
We got double glazing in that same house and it did help with the noise a bit.
Cool, good to know!
Thanks for the insight - makes me feel better about the “noise-proofness” :)
Make sure your extra layer of 13mm is battened out from the existing wall. That will go a long way to isolating any vibrations (noise)
I was thinking of going a bit overboard with Gib Rail on top of the existing Gib Board, and then doing 2 layers of 13mm Noiseline Gib.
But then i looked more closely at the original building plans, and noticed how “solidly” it seems to be built currently, and thought about just adding an extra layer of 13mm Noiseline Gib directly onto the existing Gib? In essence, that would be two layers of gib (1x 10mm, 1x 13mm noiseline), battened 50mm off from the masonry.
Im my mind, I was thinking that would add that extra little bit of noise performance? Thoughts on this? I was thinking of keeping it relatively simple for now, and then if we are finding it lacking later on, we’d do the whole Gib Rail thing.
Bear in mind that Gib is quite expensive nowdays (with fletcher’s monopoly over pretty much our entire building industry) with speciality products, like noisline, being doubly so.
So maybe give it a bit and see what it’s like before pulling the trigger, a decent block wall with a good air gap packed with batts will cancel out the vast majority of regular household noise I feel.
Yeah good plan.
Getting closer to the move, reading some stuff around masonry walls online, and hearing some of the feedback on here, I’m leaning towards bjist moving in, and then seeing what we’re dealing with and going from there.
