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Comment by mathieuh | Hacker News Reader

I live in northern ireland in an actual house and the walls are thin enough I could dip my bread into my neighbours' soup.

It is the number one reason I could never see myself living in an apartment, I'm very sensitive to noise and I get disproportionately angry at even low levels of unwanted noise. I'd be too worried about noise from neighbours.

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I live in a modern apartment in Norway (2019). I guess some of our heat insulation demands make it so that we get extra thick walls and floors, but I've never heard any noise from neighbors. No tv sounds, no stamping feet etc. Maybe twice a year someone drills a hole to mount something on the walls and I hear that for a few minutes. Even have a train passing by outside I can't hear with the windows closed.

Point being that it depends.

Edit: modern fire safety also dictates a bit how contained each unit should be, I guess.

Norwegians are also some of those most quiet people I've ever met.

Not disagreeing with your point but I’d like to support what the op said regarding “modern” buildings often having excellent sound deadening. My previous Dutch residence also had those “fake” (non concrete) walls but I couldn’t hear others in their rooms even when they played loud music (and they had different nationalities). But if no effort goes into soundproofing, it can be unsurprisingly pretty bad.

Yeah, before living where I live now, I lived for a while in an building from the late 1800s. The smaller units were of course added cheaply in modern times, and didn't align well with how it was originally built.

One example is the original thick wooden beams that was the floor went through the unit walls. So they same piece of wood I was walking on was also being walked on by the neighbors. That was a great transmission of vibrations, especially when their kid were playing on the floor hehe.

I live in a modern mid-rise in Dallas.

Same experience. Most noise comes from people in the hallways because a solid wood door does not insulate sound.

Traffic noise could be improved with triple pane windows, but really it's just un-restricted mufflers that penetrate, and that should be handled by the city.

Just a tip for anyone dealing with noise in a multi-tenant situation. Get yourself a white noise machine. It's a life changer. I thought I was going to murder my neighbor with his own leaf blower until I got it.

I find that a thunderstorm soundtrack hides external noise better than white noise. It also seems psychologically more relaxing, but YMMV

I just discovered the white noise generator in iOS/macOS. It's in Accessibility settings under Audio Visual. It's been a gamechanger for me.

I envy anyone this works for. For me, white noise is just even more noise.

The most important thing is that it be 'non looping'. I hated white noise until I ponied up for a machine that generated non looping white noise. My mind would automatically latch on to any repetition.

Anecdotally, I've heard the opposite about a lot of the new 5-over-1's going up in the bay area. Several people I know that have moved into recently-built units have complained that they can hear far more neighbor noise than they used to in their old units. This also seems to track with my experience -- I live in an older unit and can only hear my adjacent neighbors when they slam their front door, or when they're having a very loud party on a weekend. Yet when I visit friends that live in newer units, sometimes I can hear the neighbors talking at normal conversation levels through the walls.

I'm completely speculating, but maybe in newer construction, they can now use insulation materials with a very high R rating that are still fairly thin, so while you get the good thermal insulation, sound transmission is increased because there's less material in the way now. Older buildings that made up for the materials not being as high R-rated tended to do so via volume, which also helped with sound deadening. I think in a lot of places, you also need to have firewalls between units so that fire in one unit doesn't easily spread to others, but I expect those materials have also improved over the decades to where they still provide the same fire protection, but no longer have the mass to offer as much sound deadening.

A lot of units use 1/2 inch or in many cases less. Upgrading to 5/8" makes a big difference, and installing another 1/2" on top of that gives impressive noise dampening via additional mass. As does fiberglass insulation, and filling gaps around the edges. If you don't have to meet firewall code for certain walls, you can go a lot thinner and noise reduction goes down dramatically. We had an apartment that was converted from condos and noise dampening was significant. Noise was a major consideration (closely after neighborhood) when doing selection.

There's often not much insulation requirement between units because the entire building envelope is what carries the main insulation, so it's builder's choice if they want to noise insulate above and beyond the firewall requirements.

The worst in my experience has been units originally designed for rich quiet people that now are being rented by families.

The problem is that while the shape of single-family home suburbs are meticulously controlled (e.g. minimum width between each house, minimum width from the street to your home), the world of apartments are conversely very lightly regulated. California building codes added an optional appendix for noiseproofing standards for multi-family units that cities can opt-into and yet the cities with some of the strictest/most expansive SFH zoning in the Bay Area refuse to opt into this standard. I live in a multi-family unit where the HOA meticulously controls R-value of the units and puts up a huge process/review phase when changing any flooring material, but the end result is that unless kids are screaming at the top of their lungs we hear nothing. We've held karaoke parties past midnight and our neighbors have heard nothing (we've asked.)

In other words, the problem is politics. Cities need to want to make multi-family development appealing to encourage their residents to live there. There's a bit of deliberate neglect going on for multi-family housing specifically to encourage single-family living.

> California building codes added an optional appendix for noiseproofing standards for multi-family units that cities can opt-into and yet the cities with some of the strictest/most expansive SFH zoning in the Bay Area refuse to opt into this standard.

Why am I not surprised? This is why we need more city council members who rent. Renter issues are completely invisible to those holding political power.

Renters are generally much less likely to vote and so their issues get less attention.

I think this is very similar to how city council members generally never ride bicycles, so they don't care about bike-safety issues.

I viewed an apartment recently that had quadruple pane windows! The aparment faced a noisy freeway. They worked quite well.

Having stayed in Norwegian houses many times, I can attest they've really sorted their insulation out. Similarily my Swedish sister-in-law always complains about British houses when she visits, saying their cold and draughty

British houses have a worldwide reputation of bad insulation. They live in a mild climate where you don't need to heat the entire house to ensure the pipes don't freeze, and don't really need much AC to be livable in the summer. As such it is really common for people who live there to only heat the room they are in.

Also a lot of them date from the XIX century or earlier and can't be touched.

Nonsense. Most of the 19th century buildings are perfectly ordinary brick terraced houses and the later ones have cavity walls. I lived in one built in 1890 in Southampton for four years. Solid house but not of any kind of historical importance. They can be insulated by blowing fibre into the cavity or filling it with expanding foam..

British construction has bad reputation in general. They put carpets in the toilets.

Oh wow. Norway and Sweden sound like heaven for apartment living. (Or Valhalla, as the case may be.)

It's because of heat insulation, like you guessed.

It also depends on a neighbor. I heard my previous downstair neighbors only when they had guests. Now, there’s a single person who is a god damn elephant. They way she always stomps and throws things on the floor…

> even have a train passing by outside I can't hear with the windows closed.

My wife and I lived in a top floor flat in Drammen for two years. We swore we would never, ever, live that close to neighbours again. In the summer it's nice to have the windows open until your divorcée neighbour downstairs comes home and argues with her umpteenth boyfriend and her sulky teenage daughter and then the three of them each try to drown out the others with loud music and television.

It didn't matter that I couldn't hear them through the floor.

I lived in a relatively old apartment block in Austria. Only time I heard my neighbours was when they did drilling. The sound outside echo'd a lot so I could hear things in the courtyard (3 floors down) and people in nearby blocks louder than my neighbours.

I live in northern Nevada in an exurb. I go for a walk everyday that requires me to go on a road for half a mile before I get to the dirt path. On that half mile road the traffic is so constant and so loud (from my small gated community) I can’t hear whatever I’m listening to on my headphones. The clamor is so aggravating I’m usually a bit angry by the time I hit the dirt path. My exurb neighbors (multiple) have loud grinding ACs and they run them all night. I can’t leave my windows open while I sleep even when it’s in the 50s outside, because of their grinding noise.

I recently walked about 20 miles back in SF again. It was comparatively pleasant. Road traffic was slower. The materials they use to make the roads reflect less of the sound than here in Nevada. I wasn’t triggered by vehicles or traffic or trucks. I stayed in the Panhandle and could sleep with the bedroom window open.

There’s a way to make heaven or hell in both cities and rural areas.

I am just curious- why did you opt for a place that is so out of sync w what matters to you ?

Not OP, but there's so many general reasons someone buys this place:

- They didn't opt for the place, someone else in their family did

- This is where the jobs were

- What matters to them changed over time

- The place changed over time

- A lot of things matter to them, this is just one, and the place delivers on the others

- When they were looking for a place, this was what was available

- etc.

Yes, most of those apply in some form/fashion to current set-up.

If he's from reno he probably works at tesla. NV has no state income tax which lures a lot of people. The AC-at-night gripe seems off to me, you only need AC in northern nevada about 3 months of the year (they could be heat pumps for the 50F overnight lows). Reno changed a lot in the last 8 years, mostly for the worse. A lot of people who bring their big-city aggression and driving style to a medium-size town that has no infrastructure to support it. A lot of people ended up there against their will due to all the crazy covid-era migrations.

I live in an apartment in Dublin -- noise is not a problem for me. I'll concede there is a bias in Ireland against apartments. I suspect it's because of the perception that 'flats' are either like the Ballymun flats or Luxury apartments no one can afford with little room in between.

It's a real shame this bias exists in Ireland it really does little to help the housing crisis or the egregious amount of one off housing in rural Ireland does little to help infrastructure connections.

Just to chime in on apartment living in Dublin. There was a period during the late 80s and 90s when awful apartments were built in dublin (private buildings as well as social housing). Really bad sound insulation, build quality and design. They had mold problems, were poorly ventilated always too hot or too cold and were extremely grim. Even thinking about them now grims me out.

This really poisoned the well in Ireland towards apartment living.

Me too! Do you ever hear music from neighbors that goes on for hours? But the problem is, it’s not so loud that they’re having a party and you can complain. No, it’s just loud enough to hear, but not loud enough to record or for others to easily hear.

I had one set of neighbors who fell into this range for about a year. I suspect their place was sparse, I could even hear them push their chair out from dining table. I felt happy when they moved out!

> I could dip my bread into my neighbours' soup.

What an expression. I love that

I want to second this. Living in flats sounds cute for most of the people who never lived in ones that are being built with cheap materials and thin walls. It's all nice and dandy until a sill neighbour moves in and then you've got nowhere to hide.

Living in a poorly built flat is a bad experience, sure, but there are well built flats out there, where you can only hear your neighbors if they're actually being loud--really not that big a problem.

The incentive is always to build them poorly

I live in Finland in a modern apartment building. Walls have good sound insulation, and triple pane windows insulate for both heat and sound. I am next to a busy road, but can not hear it inside, unless I open some windows.

Same. I try to rent exclusively on the top-floor (next to impossible in a big city) because of a memorable experience I had with a an overweight upstairs neighbor who favored jumping jacks as his primary form of exercise.

I thought you were going to say, "I live in northern Ireland, and I can hear Spain from there."

Had that in Dublin, moved to NYC in a modern building in the freaking centre of the city and it's remarkably quiet.

Shitty construction hurts.

This really depends on the build.

I have lived/stayed in places in the middle of dense urban areas where you essentially never hear anything (occasionally sirens if the windows are open, that sort of thing), and others where you can tell when your neighbor is stirring tea.

One of the factors is cost, yes, but also age of the building and materials/techniques matter. I suppose it also matters if any of your neighbors are 23 and like powerful stereos - but that holds pretty much anywhere that isn't very rural.

Oh, and in dense urban/busy areas, height matters too. Living on the first 5 floors is far different than say 15+, in terms of how much street noise etc. you will hear with an open window (or even without).

Construction methods and quality vary a lot. Older concrete and brick multistory apartment buildings generally have excellent soundproofing. Wooden apartment buildings, like five-over-one or 3-4 story all wood apartment buildings, not so much. Low rise wooden hotels, built as cheaply as possible, are at the lower limit of “I can know exactly what my neighbours are doing if I pay attention”.

I lived in flats in the New Town of Edinburgh (i.e. fairly old buildings) for ~30 years and never heard a sound from neighbours - probably because the walls appeared to be ~1m thick sandstone!

I've lived in 3 flats across New Town and Stockbridge and every flat was horrible. I could hear the footsteps of people upstairs. Most flats have floorboards and they are not kind to the neighbors below. I'm not living in a flat ever again.

Admittedly we only lived in two flats - maybe we were lucky?

Edit: we lived in two flats for a total of nearly 25 years!

I lived in the Leith colonies for twenty years, and while I never heard my neighbours from above, or the sides, I would always hear people running up and down the stairwell, and the maindoor slamming shut.

I’ve lived in multiple modern apartments and never heard my neighbors. One time I did hear someone playing music loudly, but my watch measured it at 35dB

> I get disproportionately angry at even low levels of unwanted noise.

I also suffer from this problem. Is there a name for this?

"partypooper"

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