It would be nice to have curtains that absorb street noise.
Some custom curtain tailors offer a fabric that claims to be soundproof. It’s a little pricey. Not absurdly pricey, but it’s also a bit hard to be confident that such thin fabrics can absorb much sound (they claim 20%).
I would prefer to try hacks. I’ve heard that thick furniture moving pads absorb sound well. I’ve also heard that fiberous fabrics can be effective. For the moment, I probably want to pass on edgy ideas like egg cartons. Maybe later on those. What fabrics are decent for reducing sound? Specifically, I’m wondering about carpets or painter’s drop cloths. Not the simple white canvas drop cloths, but the thicker drop cloths may out of recycled fabrics.
I live next to a bridge with heavy traffic, a river, and train tracks on either side of said river. Thankfully the train only comes by once or twice a day on our side, but constantly over on the other one.
I got used to the noise relatively quickly after moving in, like maybe a month or two. I’m used to city noise though.
That being said, my eventual plan is to get some heavy wooden window shutters. I figure I can close them up in the colder months, and it should block some noise out. I do keep the windows open in the summer though, no A/C here.
There’s a few things at play with noise, and unfortunately there’s no easy answer to your issue.
Easiest and best bang-for-buck: seal your windows up tight. If there’s little gaps for vents, the window doesn’t close tight, or things like that, they will leak noise.
Most effective: replace windows with solid frames or insulation packed extrusions, double glazing using laminated glass, and make the inside pane a soundstop type of glass. Make sure any opening windows have seals.
The curtains probably help with some very high pitched sounds, and there may also be a placebo effect at play, but they’re going to do bugger all I’m afraid. Noise is just vibrating mass, and it’s harder to transmit vibrations through dense mass. So yes, a curtain is better than nothing, but relative to your glass and walls it’s closer to air.
If noise is an issue for sleeping, the very best thing to do before shelling out loads of money on snake oil curtains is to try a few different ear plugs.
If that is the case, there are also fresh air thingies that are mounted on the wall and have a tube outside but block any sound from outside. Useful when having a bedroom next to a busy road.
Any idea what search terms I can use to find these? Any anchor to kick off my search would be great, image, product page, whatever. I did some searches based on what you wrote and cant find it.
Try searching for “sound absorbing window vents” or “accoustic trickle vents” or “silent air vent”.
I think they all use something that is called an air maze. The air (and sound) will travel through series of bends covered with foam so the sound will be blocked but not the air. This does make the airflow slow down so it needs a fan the make it go through.
I’m most interested in a cheap option so the paragraph on “Industrial Blankets” caught my attention. But it didn’t give much detail or mention how carpet fairs in comparison.
As an experiment, I took mattress someone threw out and pulled the memory foam-like pad out, and stuffed that into my window, then hung a cheap normal blackout curtain with a drop cloth safety pinned onto that, then i have a thermal curtain hanging on a 2nd support track. It seems to work well although I’ve not tried it on a noisey night. Weekend is coming so maybe I’ll have a better idea next week.
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