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Comment by elicash | Hacker News Reader

A bit unrelated, but I'd love to use a Zillow-like platform but filtering homes for noise pollution, light pollution, air pollution. (Also climate and flooding.)

Most people wouldn't use it, because they've basically decided which city/town (bc of work/family) and are just trying to narrow down which home. But it'd be very useful to me, personally, as someone who can do my job from anywhere. Also, I'd imagine it's impossible to get detailed enough data for some of this stuff. Noise being the toughest, I'd bet, though maybe you could approximate based on various factors (traffic, etc).

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I've thought about how one would design and market soundproofed apartments and houses. You'd need to condense full-spectrum measurements of ambient levels, indoor transmission, and outdoor transmission into just one or a few numbers or letter grades, and convince other apartment buildings and homebuilders to let you run measuring microphones and speakers for a week.

Are there any standards for soundproofed construction like there are for energy-minimized construction?

There is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_transmission_class

Cool! Though unfortunately it only goes down to 125Hz or so, so it won't cover water hammer pipe noise, flushing toilets, or footsteps on higher floors.

> The STC is useful for evaluating annoyance due to speech sounds, but not music or machinery noise as these sources contain more low frequency energy than speech.

There's also Room Criteria or Noise Criteria, which measures ambient noise from 16Hz to 4kHz, but not transmission.

My dream is to have greater than 60dB of isolation across 20-20k, and preferably more like 80+. I'd like to be able to sleep inside if there's a marching band, a motorcycle tour, an airshow, and a hurricane all going on outside at the same time (and, in reverse, to be able to do all those things inside without bothering the neighbors).

STC rating, or as you point out maybe a more expansive take on noise attenuation, is going to be high on my requirements list next time I look at an apartment. I think that and general sanitation (i.e lack of rats, roaches, bedbugs, mold) are the things that have the most acute effect on livability. And not having to walk on tiptoes is nice too. Unfortunately new construction is all about making a building cheaply, but soundproofing is almost impossible to do after the fact unless you want to gut a place.

If you've ever been inside a house that has insulation installed in all interior walls, the sound mitigation is really something else. That's a feature quite high on my list, if I ever construct a home.

I'm not sure how soundproof it needs to be but my Marine Corps barracks never had sounds come through the ceilings or walls. Concrete.

As someone who pretty much fits the category of " basically decided which city/town (bc of work/family) and are just trying to narrow down which home", I would love to have this service. There are huge differences in noise levels throughout any given city, and it's not always obvious from just a satellite map. Unfortunately, it's a very hard problem to solve. I did a lot of research before renting my current house. I thought I had done pretty well for about 2 hours after I moved in, then I found out that my next-door neighbor has two little dogs with a high-pitched bark and Olympic-swimmer level lungs. The neighbor has absolutely no interest in trying to control them. It would be a hell of an app that could have warned me about that.

We’ve started working on some functionality like you are describing - to show noise levels for a given real estate location. If you have a sec, I’d love any constructive feedback. (The demo is just U.S. locations for now but the service is global)”. And then add the link: https://tether-data.com/noise-report/

Realtor.com and the Realtor app have noise level and flood risk maps.

They need to be able to use it as an actual filter when searching. That's not there yet. And... I'm unsure how accurate it is - maybe better for some areas - but I've seen some "low noise" areas that are... pretty noisy, imo.

I wish you could filter by what other people have searched for.

I want to look at the neihborhoods that all the people who don't give a crap about anything are clicking on.

Listening to jake brakes and a train a few times a day is a lot bad for my health than easily irritated neighbors.

air pollution is highly localized, e.g. near (downwind from) freeways. Not enough people have purpleair sensors to make this a reality.

You could have a mixture of exact scores like for whole cities < https://aqicn.org/map/usa/ > and then combine that with localized scores based on things like being near a freeway.

Walk Score isn't an exact science, but is still a useful measure.

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