New built house vibrating

freeisgood

Absolutely right about the geography of the road. How old/worn the road surface and man holes/ pot holes in the road. We are right by a busy road with buses and lorries, there is a metal access cover in the road outside our house, every time a large vehicle goes over the cover, our whole house vibrates and windows rattle.

mgarl10024

comeandgo wrote: »

In my area the houses all vibrate slightly when the trains pass. We are forever straightening the pictures on the walls.

Doesn't this damage a house over the long term?

Brock_and_Roll

I live next to a mainline railway and a busy road in a 150+ year old house.

HGVs and trains cause vibrations but much less than previously due to a) lighter trains and b) better HGVs and c) improved road surface.

After all these years house is still here with a few little cracks but not bad for age.

The real fun is on rare occasions when we get a very heavy freight train carrying aggregates. These run very slowly late at night and it seems that the vibrations or a kind of natural frequency so the whole house rocks very slowly. The earth certainly moves for my wife and I !!

stator

Out of interest, what's the speed limit? Are vehicles sticking to it?

HAMISH_MCTAVISH

dret wrote: »

The vibrations are ground bourne. it feels like they are coming through the floor and resonate through the structure of the house

There's a couple of things you need to look at here, the trench solution already mentioned is one, but if the vibrations are particularly severe on some occasions (ie, much more than just a faint annoyance) then learning the resonant frequency of the building is another one of them.

Resonance is the tendency of an object to oscillate with greater amplitude at some frequencies than at others.

The house, and various sub structures of it, will have a resonant frequency where the amplitude is maximised. You may notice that the house vibrates a bit with many vehicles, but vibrates much more strongly on some occasions.

If this is occurring occasionally when some of these HGV's pass by, then chances are that through bad luck or bad design, they are causing vibration at or around the resonance frequency of the building. If that's happening, the vibration could actually cause significant damage to the building over time.

Vehicles passing by will generate different frequencies and amplitude of vibration depending on size, wheel spacing, load, but most importantly speed.

If it's serious enough to cause building damage over time then the council may be able to help by changing the speed limit on the road outside or introducing/removing traffic calming measures. Anything to change the speed of those vehicles away from the resonance frequency. (either up or down, doesn't matter)

With a house (as opposed to a bridge or skyscraper), then resonance is probably not going to cause any kind of catastrophic failure, but it'll be bloomin annoying and will cause lots of aggravating small faults to develop over time, cracks in walls, loose screws, plumbing joints, watertight seals, etc.....

[Deleted User]

Try putting up a yellow bird house on the edge of your property, near the road. See if that slows the traffic down and reduces the vibrations.

wolfplayer

dret wrote: »

I have read about trench digging and filling as a possible remedy. I'm willing to give this a go, but wondered who to approach and how much it might cost?

I do not know anything about the technicals of such things

I did read something from WW1 about an army putting massive heavy calibre fixed cannons into position, to defend its ports and naval base areas.

When situating each of the heavy calibre cannon postions (huge guns) They excavated deep, and the loaded the large cavities with junk - old bicycle frames and lots of bits and pieces etc, to line the sides and act as shock absorbing material - and then pumped in loads and loads of concrete. All to limit shake and vibrations, for the gunner crews, and sometimes surrounding building areas like the ports.