Need help soundproofing a new garage shop

[Dave Carey]

Am in the process of moving. The new shop will be in one bay of a three bay garage. After years of somewhat putting up with the noise from my basement shop, my wife wants this one soundproofed especially inasmuch as it's a to be built house. To settle on the final design I need to give the builder specs. I plan to have a wall built between the shop and the other two bays. I've been reading about soundproofing technology but wonder if anyone has had experience doing something like this and has some tips. Appreciate any suggestions. Cheers

[Van Huskey]

No experiance with a shop (mine have all been detached) by decent amount of experiance with home theater and my HTs are a LOT louder than a shop. Start with a second layer of dryway with Green Glue and do your best to give as much distance from the worst offenders like DC from the living space. Also make sure your DC is decoupled from the living space, having it hard bolted to any wall especially a common wall with the living space if horrible.

[John K Jordan]

One thing sometimes used in a wall to help insulate sound is staggered stud construction. I built my sound-insulating closet for the cyclone and big air compressor with this method. You can look it up, but basically I built a wall as if I were using 2x6 studs but instead used 2x4 studs on 16" centers. Each alternate stud was fastened only to one wall, one on the inner wall, the next on the outer wall. This way no stud transmits sound from one side to the other. Insulation is threaded between the studs.

Don't forget sound that can go up and over the wall and through ductwork. For an air return from my closet I built a duct with a number of 90deg turns and sprayed the inside with a coating to help baffle and absorb the sound.

You could also search the ClearVue cyclone forum for experience people have with insulating materials. The 5hp cyclone sounds like a freight train in the open room. Outside my closet I can carry on a normal conversation and hear the radio.

An architect with experience in building studios for recording and video might be worth consulting. A happy spouse is a wonderful thing.

JKJ

[Peter Aeschliman]

If you want to be hardcore about it, you should insulate the walls and ceilings, use resilient channel on the walls and two layers of 5/8 drywall, and resilient channel with channel clips on the ceiling with 2 layers of drywall and green glue between the panels. Green glue doesn't work on walls apparently.

For your entry door, use a solid core door with weather stripping.

As Van said, don't attach your DC or any other machines to the walls. Don't attach benches to your framing, and don't do any sanding or hammer/chisel work on counter tops that are attached to the walls.

The key principle is to isolate the interior surfaces from your framing. The vibrations will pass through the drywall into the studs and then into the surrounding rooms. Next most important is mass. Heavy drywall will not vibrate as much. After that is absorption for airborne sound waves (the insulation in the stud and joist cavities).

And really really hardcore folks build a room within a room. But you give up a lot of space that way.

It's a lot of work to do it right, so be patient and see it through. Happy wife, happy life!!!

[Greg Parrish]

2x6 stud walls, spray in foam insulation for walls and ceiling and double drywall. Don't wall mount tools or dust collector. Separate garage by closet or laundry room space. Should be quiet as can be.

[mreza Salav]

We built our house and I wanted my shop to be in the garage for the same issues you had with a basement shop.
Our garage is 3+1 and I separated the two with a wall; a 2 bay garage is for the cars and the other area for the shop which is closer to the house.
The house has 5" spray foam on exterior walls. There is also OSB on the exterior of the house (including walls to garage). Then I put 5/8" drywall inside AND outside (over OSB) on all walls shared between the house and garage. It does a very good job of sound proofing to the extend that I can run my machines in the shop without people in the house noticing mostly; except when the shaper or planer are running (it can be heard but faintly).
No complain from my wife anymore.

[mark mcfarlane]

All of the info provided so far in this thread is spot on. Room-in-a-room is the best - gives you acoustic isolation between the spaces. Staggered studs, so the studs themselves can't transmit low frequency energy between rooms is a cheaper alternative to two separate walls. 'Airtight' is one of the key words here. One hole in one place (e.g. ducting) will completely eliminate the value of all your other efforts. If your third bay has an exterior garage door, that may be the weak part of whatever you do since the machine noise will go through that door and back into the adjacent house. Keep the weakest link in mind when you do your design and work on that. You can spend a million dollars isolating a room but if the door is open the million was wasted....

[Dave Carey]

Thanks folks! All good ideas. Had not thought of the staggered 2x4 system for the wall separating the bays - or seen that tip elsewhere. The builder uses 2x6s in the exterior walls with foam and blown insulation. Not hanging cabinets on the wall is a bummer inasmuch as the 12x20 space is much smaller than I'm used to; have rethought storage and vowed to be more organized especially as I've promised myself a lathe upgrade as part of the move. Had planned to put the dust collector in the corner near the house but have now rearranged that too thanks to that tip. No ducts; will heat/cool with a Mitsubichi unit mounted to the outside wall. Really appreciate the time you guys took to consider the issue and give me the benefit of your experience. Cheers, Dave

[Frank Pratt]

For my compressor/dust collector closet I installed 2 doors, back to back. The doors are pre-hung, steel exterior doors, mounted with the jambs decoupled. Each door has a layer of 3/4" MDF screwed on with a layer of Green Glue and an additional set of good weather stripping. It is very effective.

[Jim Andrew]

Menards is selling blue denim insulation for the purpose of sound deadening. My nephew used it in his new house to keep the noise from the kids in the basement from driving him nuts.

[Jamie Buxton]

.. Not hanging cabinets on the wall is a bummer..

I can't see any reason to avoid handing cabinets on a sound-insulated wall. If anything, the cabinets just offer more resistance to sound.

The only exception to this is if your sound-insulating wall is a double wall. If so, the cabinets may only connect to the wall on the shop face -- no connectors like screws can cross the gap into the other wall.

[Mel Fulks]

I hear good things about Green Glue,but it's expensive. I would make the wall as thick as you can and depend mainly on the ground up news paper cellulose stuff. I ground up the packed clumps with my bare hands ,stuffed it into plastic bags, then stuffed those into wall. And used extra Sheetrock. Put the first rock layer up in two foot high pieces to make stuffing job a little easier.

[Ken Fitzgerald]

High field strength MR scanners produce a terribly loud noise while scanning. With the invention of self-shielding magnets, the magnetic field from the magnet became less of a problem but the noise while scanning was a real issue. The way they mitigated the effect of the noise outside the scan room was by doubling the wall thickness, staggering the framing and insulating both walls.

[John Lankers]

Don't underestimate how much sound and vibration travels through a concrete floor. Rubber feet or hockey pucks under the table saw, band saw, dust collector ... absorb most of the vibration otherwise transferred through the floor. Avoid machinery making physical contact with the soundproofed wall.

[Mel Fulks]

Ken ,the staggered framing is good in that it makes two "uncoupled " walls. But the fiberglass insulation often used with it does not get high marks. I think a key factor is whether or not op wants to do this extra work or leave it to the contractor.
I'm sure that some of the things I consider expensive do pay off in decreased paid labor.

[Peter Aeschliman]

No problems with hanging cabinets on the wall. my earlier point was just that you don't want to do any noisy work on the lower cabinet countertops if they're fastened to the wall.

I do like the staggered studs idea as it will reduce vibrations through the wall. but remember that the wall will still be nailed to the top plate, so if you have living quarters above, you will still get some noise up there. So that's why decoupling the drywall from the studs and joists is important.

[Ken Fitzgerald]

Ken ,the staggered framing is good in that it makes two "uncoupled " walls. But the fiberglass insulation often used with it does not get high marks. I think a key factor is whether or not op wants to do this extra work or leave it to the contractor.
I'm sure that some of the things I consider expensive do pay off in decreased paid labor.

Mel, IIRC they used a sound deadening insulation. When we remodeled our kitchen last year, they installed what they claimed sound deadening batting in the dry wall between the kitchen and the bathroom.

[Erik Loza]

2x6 stud walls, spray in foam insulation for walls and ceiling and double drywall. Don't wall mount tools or dust collector. Separate garage by closet or laundry room space. Should be quiet as can be.

+1^^^...

The dust collector (and ducting) will be by far the loudest thing in your shop. It's a low-frequency harmonic that really travels. I don't know if it has an application for WW'ing shops but I've been in a few newly built parking garages thathave some type of sprayed in foam along the exposed ceilings that looks somewhat like the old "popcorn-type" ceiling texture but anyhow, it is dead-quiet inside those garages. Really eerie to walk into one.

Erik

[Frank Pratt]

Mineral wool products like Roxul Safe n' Sound are far better than fiberglass bats at sound attenuation.

[Ole Anderson]

Roxull Safe and Sound mineral wool insulation is much better than cellulose or Fiberglas insulation. I made the door to my dust collector closet a sandwich of 1/2" plywood with 1/2" drywall as the solid core.

[mreza Salav]

The easiest/simplest (instead of staggered framing) would be more and thicker layers of drywall. I have two layers of 5/8" and is good enough (plus the 5" spray foam).
Putting the DC in a closet helps (I have my cyclone in a closet). Although it is noisy the noise is not screaming loud like a planer
or shaper taking large bite.

[Van Huskey]

The easiest/simplest (instead of staggered framing) would be more and thicker layers of drywall.

This alone helps but the key is to decouple the sheets from each other which is where the Green Glue I mentioned comes into play. Staggered walls are OK too BUT they eat floor space AND as noted they are still connected to the structure unless they are used to build a "true room inside room" most people are not going to do this for a shop, but I have seen it for low to mid 6 figure HT rooms but usually built into the plans for new construction.

One other point is try to locate your dust collection on a non-shared wall and NOT in a corner. In the middle of the wall the majority of the sound will be produced near only two wall boundries (called quarter-space), placing it in a corder results in being close to three boundries (eighth space) and increases the SPL by 3dB out in the room, this is why in the days before cheap inhome computer based testing became the norm in AV people recommended corner loading a subwoofer.

If you are serious investitage the home theater forums, particularly AVS, the average HT forumite knows a ton about soundproofing and there are plenty of professionals that post. The SPLs people are trying to contain are massive compared to a shop, for example my HT that I am slowly getting together will have eighteen 18" subwoofers with a combined (real) 27,000 watts in roughly 5,000 cubic feet each one in a LLT enclosure (roughly 20 cu ft per driver). This is a "moderate" system compared to some so despite what some people think fracking is not the cause of the current earthquake outbreak it is the proliferation of HTs driven to one upsmanship via the internet.

My point is there are much richer veins of knowledge on the internet in this area and shops are easier to accomplish good sound control since they have lower sound pressure levels as well as bandwidths that are generally much higher in frequency than the average HT and the higher the frequency the easier it is to attenuate with standard construction methods.

[mark mcfarlane]

... This is a "moderate" system compared to some so despite what some people think fracking is not the cause of the current earthquake outbreak it is the proliferation of HTs driven to one upsmanship via the internet...

I had a good laugh over this. My day job is finding oil and gas. I wonder if your argument would work in court.... Probably not in the lower income areas in Oklahoma which are seeing something like 100-1000X the normal expected earthquake activity.

As a linguistic note, the industry term is 'fracing' not 'fracking'. There is no 'K' in the phrase 'hydraulic fracturing'. I suspect journalists changed the spelling.

[Van Huskey]

I had a good laugh over this. My day job is finding oil and gas. I wonder if your argument would work in court.... Probably not in the lower income areas in Oklahoma which are seeing something like 100-1000X the normal expected earthquake activity.

As a linguistic note, the industry term is 'fracing' not 'fracking'. There is no 'K' in the phrase 'hydraulic fracturing'. I suspect journalists changed the spelling.

I had to laugh at your post as well, really I was laughing at myself. I actually spelled it fracing at first, since that is what makes sense as you point out, thinking I had seen it spelled with a K I did a quick Google and "corrected" myself.


BTW that would not silliest basis for a case that I have heard argued in court...

[John K Jordan]

... This is a "moderate" system compared to some so despite what some people think fracking is not the cause of the current earthquake outbreak it is the proliferation of HTs driven to one upsmanship via the internet. ...


I laughed out loud too!

I suspect the home theater/automobile stereo ego game exceeds even chainsaws and firearms in contributing to hearing loss! At least chainsaw operators and shooters SOMETIMES wear hearing protection...

JKJ

[Doug Ladendorf]

+1 for Roxul. I used that in my garage shop and it does help quite a bit. Also Homosote instead of sheetrock will diffuse the sound.

[Mel Fulks]

The Roxul Safe N Sound is much better than ordinary fiberglass stuff. IF the cellulose is dense packed ,I think it works as well as Roxul. And the dense packing takes some work. I used both on one project.

[Chris Padilla]

Some may have done this but you could always 'hear' the train coming if you put an ear to the metal track before you could hear it in the air. Sounds travel better through a medium versus air.

So in light of this, all the advice given is 'sound' (pun intended) but keep that in mind as you research and think about how you build things. If you could fully surround your shop in a cushion of air, that would be best. In theaters, they use fabrics to help absorb sounds to prevent reflections although hanging curtain in your shop sounds (and will look) pretty silly. Any holes that air can travel through...so can sound. Plug 'em up. Think of wood and nails and screws like the metal train track. They can all transmit sound well.

[Dave Carey]

I said it in an earlier post but it bears repeating - you guys are great. The ideas and especially the experience you offer is invaluable. I've asked the builder for two estimates: one with Quiet Rock on the walls and double wallboard with green glue on the ceiling and one with double wallboard with green glue and resilient channels for walls and ceiling. Both with Roxul and plenty of outlets. Should know in a couple of weeks if it's affordable! Thanks again guys. Cheers, Dave

[mark mcfarlane]

... In theaters, they use fabrics to help absorb sounds to prevent reflections although hanging curtain in your shop sounds (and will look) pretty silly. Any holes that air can travel through...so can sound. Plug 'em up. Think of wood and nails and screws like the metal train track. They can all transmit sound well.

Most surface treatments are to control reflections within the room, they don't do much for stopping transmission outside the room. Still, acoustic treatment in the shop will make the room sound 'deader' and that may be enjoyable, particularly around something like a DC placed against a wall, or god forbid, a corner.

Owens Corning 703 and 705 are also popular high density fiberglass-based acoustic products.

[Jim Dwight]

If there will be finished space above the shop garage, I think that will be your main issue. At least it will if you put the shop garage away from the house. Mine is 14x24 and is the furthest bay of a 3 bay. There is a bedroom that we didn't plan to use much above it. If it is in use, I can't use the shop. I only have a little over 8 foot ceilings but I wish I had used resilient channel. It has 5/8 sheet rock and fiberglass insulation. Rock wool might have helped a little too. Sound through walls will only go into the car garage in my case. I also have no indoor access to the shop garage. That minimizes any sawdust tracking in. My shop garage has a garage door on one end but no garage door opener. My late wife used to bang the opener right when my hand was closest to the blade of the table saw in a garage shop where the cars and tools shared space. I don't want that happening in this shop so no opener. I can push tools and workbench against the walls and pull a car in but I have only done it once.

[Chris Parks]

To relate my cheap version of a soundproof cabinet for my CV cyclone.

I built a 4 x 2 frame and sheeted one side with 19mm MDF then collected all the cardboard boxes I could find, flattened them into the frame and then sheeted the other side of the frame with 19mm MDF. The roof was made the same way and I hung the cyclone from the roof with the motor partially exposed for cooling and simplicity of installation. While not whisper quite the sound levels are below 60DB and a normal conversation can be held while it is running.

[Peter Aeschliman]

Broken record here... But the type of insulation you use behind your drywall is far less important than decoupling the drywall from the framing and adding mass to the walls and ceilings (i.e., double drywall).

Insulation tackles airborne noise, but inside of the walls and ceilings, the airborne noise will be limited to that which vibrates through your drywall. So if your drywall is decoupled from your framing, and you have heavy double drywall to reduce vibration, the type of insulation isn't terribly important.

It's best to limit the vibration passing into the wall and ceiling cavities in the first place.

Roxul is not a bad product, but I think it's being over-emphasized here.

[Allan Speers]

^ Peter has it right.

In fact, in some cases you get better isolation with NOTHING inside the walls, and adding insulation just increases energy transmission.

His earlier post re resilient channel is pretty good advice also. (R.C. makes it easier)) but I would change one thing:

Instead of "two layers of 5/8 drywall" I'd use one layer, plus a layer of either a different thickness, or a different material. (shaftliner, MDF, whatever) This causes the two layers to cancel out any formants, though I'm being rather picky here, especially for a shop.

Be VERY careful about any AC or heat ducting. A mistake there can negate all your other work. Use resilient mounts and baffling.

If you have a concrete floor, then there's no worries, but give thought to the ceiling. If the sound goes up & across, wifey will be no happy.

[Bill Jobe]

The bottoms of empty egg cartons.

[mark mcfarlane]

The bottoms of empty egg cartons.

... may help just a little bit as a diffractor, but I suspect will be fairly useless as an absorber, and are probably a serious fire hazard in a shop.

I've never held a match to one but if it's paper-based it may burn easily.

[Frank Pratt]

I did a LOT of research before building my cyclone room, because it is located in my developed basement next to the garage/shop.

Walls consist of: 5/8" drywall, GreenGlue, 5/8" drywall, 2.5" steel stud /w Roxul Safe 'n Sound batts, air space, 2.5" steel stud /w 3" Roxul Safe 'n Sound batts, 5/8" drywall, GreenGlue, 5/8" drywall.

Ceiling consists of: 5/8" drywall, GreenGlue, 5/8" drywall, 2.5" steel studs, supported independently from the structure above, 12" of tightly packed fiberglass batts.

Entry to the room is 2 back to back, prehung exterior steel insulated doors. Each door has 3/4" MDF screwed to it with GreenGlue between and an additional set of weatherstripping. The jambs are separate & isolated.

The walls & ceiling are not secured to the house framing at all, just to the concrete slab.

If I'm standing outside the room, 4' from the door & turn on the cyclone (Onieda V-5000), I cannot hear it start or run. I have to get my ear within a couple of inches of the door to hear it.

Safe 'n Sound is substantially better than fiberglass batts, according to published test data. GreenGlue performance is also backed up by published data.

I can't imagine a situation where bats would actually help transmit sound better than an empty airspace. If there is, please let me know.

Sorry for the long post, but hopefully it will help others. I consider the project a great success. My wife was especially impressed.

[Mel Fulks]

Good info, Frank. I just add that the "decoupled" needs to be in the remarks about " empty air space". Or some will see seemingly contradictory advice.

[Jim Huelskoetter]

I have no personal experience but read a paper saying steel studs, as Frank mentions using above, are better than wood studs for reducing sound transmission.

[John K Jordan]

Be VERY careful about any AC or heat ducting. A mistake there can negate all your other work. Use resilient mounts and baffling.


This is what I designed (and built) to minimize the sound coming through the return-air duct from my cyclone dust collector closet.

Instead of a hole through the wall the air (and sound) has to go up into the ceiling and through the trusses just below the roof. A series of 90-deg bends coupled with a coating of flexible material inside keeps the sound way down. I placed the inlet away from the loudest parts of the cyclone. I was careful to size the cross-sections to prevent air restriction. Not clearly shown are a couple of internal baffles. I also insulated with fiberglass all around the duct in the ceiling.

Instead of sheet metal I built this with plywood, glued and screwed. Just for fun I put HVAC type filters on both the inlet and outlet grilles.

I'm sure the stealth bomber designers would laugh at this but very little sound gets through.

http://www.sawmillcreek.org/attachment.php?attachmentid=344541&d=1474477718

This general method might work for a normal HVAC duct too.

JKJ

[Frank Pratt]

I have no personal experience but read a paper saying steel studs, as Frank mentions using above, are better than wood studs for reducing sound transmission.

I used full 16" wide batts, compressing & tucking the edges into the studs, which I think is key to good sound blocking/absorbsion.

[Frank Pratt]

That's a mighty impressive RA duct, John. I'm sure not a lot of sound makes it way back into your shop.

My RA duct is about 30" x 10" with a 90 degree bend at one end and a dog leg in the middle. It's lined with fiberglass duct liner insulation. It's pretty quiet, the noise of the air rushing in the inlets drowns out the return air noise.