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Comment by hartator | Hacker News Reader

One night ago, I tried a new thing.

I slept with the new Airpods Pro with noise cancellation on. I am trying to escape road noises. E.g., random car noises, sirens, tyres screeching, etc. Noise cancellation on these are crazy good. However, it was actually worse to find peace. I keep trying to guess if I am still hearing noises when it was actually fully quiet. It was a bad night.

Yesterday night, I just make the A/C runs its fans all night. Which I guess is very similar to brown noise. Found peace immediately. And I was able to ignore almost road noises during the full night (despite being the same as the previous night). It was a surprising restful night.

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> Yesterday night, I just make the A/C runs its fans all night.

If you run it every night, and if you're doing it just for the noise, understand that your next month's electricity bill is going to be quite... shocking.

We used to run box fans at night in our bedroom when we lived in apartments to drown out the sounds of neighbors and traffic noise. We continued the tradition when we bought our first house. One day I decided to get some real data on what our energy spending was and plugged a box fan into a kill-a-watt. I don't remember the exact number but it was high enough that the very next day I bought a "white noise machine" for every bedroom in the house and our monthly electricity bill dropped IN HALF. Basically paid for themselves in the first week.

The best white noise machines are made by "LectroFan". These used to cost $15 on Amazon, now they are $50. Whichever brand you buy, the most important thing is to get one with a good-size speaker so that it can reproduce lower frequencies decently.

> If you run it every night, and if you're doing it just for the noise, understand that your next month's electricity bill is going to be quite... shocking.

If it's just the fans, shouldn't be pretty economical? I thought also circulating the air was a net positive anyway.

I got used to running the fan over summer and loved the comfort it provided. I usually wear earplugs to sleep and it was nice to have something just constantly blocking out traffic and neighbour noise without any effort. Now it's getting colder I was looking at buying a LectroFan to do the same thing. Based on your comments even at $50 they seem worth it, so thanks for the recommendation!

you can soundproof your sleeping room, just need to dampen frequencies that offer direction cues, they are above 1khz. electronics, car sound whooshing, rattling all produce those frequencies. if it's hard to dampen enough - dampen as much as you find economically viable and raise noise floor by running ventilation or big diameter fan, it will mask the rest of them.

also having fresh air ventilation (with soundproofed intake - they use quiet fan) is much more comfortable than having windows opened on busy street.

> It was a bad night

> It was a surprising restful night.

Is not a night of bad sleep often followed by a night of good sleep?

> Is not a night of bad sleep often followed by a night of good sleep?

For me, usually bad nights are more common than good nights.

Aren't AC/fans/etc considered white noise?

Running Bluetooth through your brain all night probably isn’t great either

Never thought about that. Isn't Bluetooth very low power compared to a cell phone or even if a microwave is running nearby?

Yes, it is low power, and it's also inserted a centimeter or so inside your ear canal, while a microwave is typically at arm's length

And it's inserted for much longer.

Unclear if airpod pros use bluetooth at all if they are not playing any audio just doing noise cancelling. I suspect they don’t, and just ping the phone at intervals to stay connected.

But either way, the health impact of a bad night’s sleep is going to be so so so much worse than whatever small or nonexistent effect bluetooth has

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