Improving 'noisiness' of suspended timber flooring

red_imps_2003

To be fair, I think the noise-proofing of our home is not wildly different to that of others with the same type of ground floor support. It's just that our previous homes have always been older terraced properties built on concrete flooring while this one is built on wooden joists and we are struggling to adjust. If you drop an object on a slab of concrete it is always going to make less of a racket than if you drop the same object on a sheet of wood covering a void. I'm thinking of the difference between whacking a tree stump vs whacking, say, a table.

I guess another way of looking at it is if you think about people running about or dropping heavy objects upstairs; it makes quite a racket, right? In a house built on wooden joists the ground floor makes a similar racket, whereas a house built on concrete base makes much less noise (I couldn't tell you where a house built on concrete joists fits on the scale). I just wondered whether there is any way to minimise such a difference. Insulation? Reinforcement? Filling the void beneath the floorboards with ballast of some sort? I've googled floor insulation and most solutions seem to involve fixing matting in the voids between the floorboards and the joists; I'm wondering to what extent such a solution would actually mute impact sounds, given the potential costs involved, and if there's a way of actually making the support more solid (e,g, filling with concrete or a ballast of some sort). I guess it depends how much of the noise we hear from impact on our flooring is airborne vibration and how much is being transmitted through the physical structures.

phil24_7

I mean between the joists and the sub floor. Piers, a small wall or an RSJ (or combination of the above) whatever is easiest or cheapest.