Pathway to Successful Sound Testing
We have undertaken hundreds of sound throughout London and the South East and have managed to streamline our pathway to successful sound testing. We also offer robust and cost effective acoustic design advice to ensure your compliance with Part E of Regulations. Our usual pathway for successful sound testing is:
1. Our Acoustic Design Service
2. Acoustic Site Audits
3. Precompletion Sound Testing
Acoustic Design Service
On our experience some of the most common mistakes during the construction are as follows:
- Using lightweight blocks in the inner envelope construction as sound will travel along light block-work both vertically and horizontally from dwelling to dwelling.
- The use of resilient suspended ceilings will help improve the performance of the floor partition.
- Not incorporating a high quality resilient acoustic membrane on top of the floor to improve the impact performance of a floor.
- Ensuring all penetration’s are fully sealed where they terminate through floors and they are adequately boxed with acoustic quilt and two layers of plasterboard.
Acoustic Site Audits
We can undertake acoustic site audits, to let us view the existing site construction. This allows us to check for potential problematic areas such as the inclusion of lightweight blocks within the existing wall construction. It also lets us check that the installation teams are installing the acoustic materials as per manufacturer’s guidelines, thus avoiding crucial onsite mistakes. In our experience a sound test failure is often due to the poor workmanship rather than the actual design. The site survey visits negate the risk of sound test failure.
We can also undertake sample sound testing of the existing construction. This offers an accurate overview of the acoustic performance of the existing partitions, which enables us to offer a targeted acoustic design which takes into account the performance of the existing construction.
Defect Diagnosis & Remedial Advice
With many years’ experience in building acoustics, we are able to diagnose the reasons for the sound test failure and recommend a cost-effective solution. Often, the reasons for the partition failure are obvious to the test engineer in which case the advice will be minimal and subsequently the cost for acoustic design advice will be minimal. Sometimes, there are more technical issues which require more detailed diagnosis and invasive investigation, such as large amounts of noise flanking due to serious design faults, e.g. poor material isolation.
Precompletion Sound Testing
To help enforce good acoustic design principles pre-completion sound testing was introduced July 2003, this resulted in all new build properties and conversions which were built after this date are require 10% of each party wall/floor construction type to be tested.
Whatever the problem we can usually find an acoustic solution that will satisfy Part E of Building Regulations. If you have a project that’s needs acoustic design advice or needs sound insulation testing then please contact us at: info@aptsoundtesting.co.uk or phone us directly on 0203 669 2650 and we should be able to offer you an expedient acoustic solution to help you achieve practical completion.