It would be nice to have curtains that absorb street noise.
Some custom curtain tailors offer a fabric that claims to be soundproof. It’s a little pricey. Not absurdly pricey, but it’s also a bit hard to be confident that such thin fabrics can absorb much sound (they claim 20%).
I would prefer to try hacks. I’ve heard that thick furniture moving pads absorb sound well. I’ve also heard that fiberous fabrics can be effective. For the moment, I probably want to pass on edgy ideas like egg cartons. Maybe later on those. What fabrics are decent for reducing sound? Specifically, I’m wondering about carpets or painter’s drop cloths. Not the simple white canvas drop cloths, but the thicker drop cloths may out of recycled fabrics.
There’s a few things at play with noise, and unfortunately there’s no easy answer to your issue.
Easiest and best bang-for-buck: seal your windows up tight. If there’s little gaps for vents, the window doesn’t close tight, or things like that, they will leak noise.
Most effective: replace windows with solid frames or insulation packed extrusions, double glazing using laminated glass, and make the inside pane a soundstop type of glass. Make sure any opening windows have seals.
The curtains probably help with some very high pitched sounds, and there may also be a placebo effect at play, but they’re going to do bugger all I’m afraid. Noise is just vibrating mass, and it’s harder to transmit vibrations through dense mass. So yes, a curtain is better than nothing, but relative to your glass and walls it’s closer to air.
If noise is an issue for sleeping, the very best thing to do before shelling out loads of money on snake oil curtains is to try a few different ear plugs.
A word of advice: if your household has a gravity-centered airflow, please do NOT block all small gaps, else you might develop nasty air quality-related problems later on
gravity-centered airflow
What do you mean by this? I’ve never heard that term before
I was paraphrasing from my mother tongue, so idk if the term is 100% accurate. But in a nutshell, many older houses (at least where I come from, in Europe) don’t have machines that take care of the airflow/changing fresh air, but rather have systems designed around the natural airflow based on gravity. In these kind of homes, making DIY adjustments might break this gravitational airflow, causing mold issues and bad air quality in general.
I don’t know if this is a thing in 'murica but I thought my small addition might save someone a house, hence I decided to include it in the conversation :)
IKEA actually has some but I sort of doubt how much they actually block:
https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/gunnlaug-sound-absorbing-curtain-white-60500170/
blackout curtains aren’t half bad at this tbh
Sound absorbing materials with some space between them will work best, so if you go with curtains you’ll want to get the double curtain rod to put in two sets. The space between the material helps reduce the transfer of sound energy.
White noise machines do wonders for killing external noise, but then that’s all you hear. Similar to running a loud fan, I can’t hear anything when my fan is running.
Is the idea to have the window open while reducing noise? Otherwise, wouldn’t it make more sense to replace the window glass?
If that is the case, there are also fresh air thingies that are mounted on the wall and have a tube outside but block any sound from outside. Useful when having a bedroom next to a busy road.
Any idea what search terms I can use to find these? Any anchor to kick off my search would be great, image, product page, whatever. I did some searches based on what you wrote and cant find it.
Try searching for “sound absorbing window vents” or “accoustic trickle vents” or “silent air vent”.
I think they all use something that is called an air maze. The air (and sound) will travel through series of bends covered with foam so the sound will be blocked but not the air. This does make the airflow slow down so it needs a fan the make it go through.
I spent many years trying to sound insulate band and recording rooms on the cheap. I’m not an engineer but from my experience you need mass to stop street noise, which has a lot of low frequency power. No amount of foam or fluffy fabric will make a noticeable difference. Save your money on the ‘soundproof’ fabrics, they’re no better than furniture pads, which can help a little but just aren’t dense enough to stop much bass. Best I’ve found for windows is particle board with chunks of tire rubber nailed on. But you probably don’t want to board up your windows so that’s probably not a good solution for you
I always wanted to find a heavy sheet of rubber to see if that worked but never found anything affordable I could repurpose. Also wonder if heavy muslin dipped in some kind of rubber material might do anything, but never tried that either. Maybe something like those flaps they use in commercial coolers, those are pretty dense, but a sheet. Sorry no specific recommendations for your case but keep a look out for any dense material you could fashion into a curtain or window cover.
But also just check around your windows if it they need any sealing. A tiny opening can transmit a lot more sound than you think.
Right, no “soundproof” curtain will absorb low frequency noise (which street noise unfortunately to a large extend consists of), regardless what ads are trying to sell you. Heavy curtains can absorb high and mid range frequencies quite well and professional acoustic curtains made of heavy (≥500 g/m²) Molton or Calmuc are the best you could get (the cloth costs about 10-15 €/m²), but if honest producers will tell you they won’t help against low frequency noise. Anyway, if your windows aren’t too large you could try that for a few bucks…
The best bet are new insulated vacuum triple glass windows that aren’t cheap at all.
Sounds hates mass, so the easiest and cheapest option would be heavy curtains, the heavier the better.
I would think two thinner curtains would be more effective than the same width thick curtain, since the decoupling would hinder the sound transfer? Obviously that said, two thick curtains would be best.
Yeah, pretty much any “blackout curtain” these days also says how many decibels it blocks right on the description.
If one won’t do it, get a double curtain rod
