We’ve recently purchased a house that was built in 1982, as a Multi Dwelling Unit.
The plans show that the Intertenancy wall is built as a Firestop Wall, and is made of 200mm thick Masonry Blocks (Vibrapac), 50mm Strapping on top of the blocks, with Batts, and topped off with 9.5mm Gib (on both sides of the wall).
I was wondering what peoples experiences were with this type of wall from this era in terms of Noise Isolation? Concerned with not only sounds coming from the neighbors, but also sending any noise their way.
We are planning on adding an extra layer of 13mm Noiseline Gib once we move in.
I was thinking of going a bit overboard with Gib Rail on top of the existing Gib Board, and then doing 2 layers of 13mm Noiseline Gib.
But then i looked more closely at the original building plans, and noticed how “solidly” it seems to be built currently, and thought about just adding an extra layer of 13mm Noiseline Gib directly onto the existing Gib? In essence, that would be two layers of gib (1x 10mm, 1x 13mm noiseline), battened 50mm off from the masonry.
Im my mind, I was thinking that would add that extra little bit of noise performance? Thoughts on this? I was thinking of keeping it relatively simple for now, and then if we are finding it lacking later on, we’d do the whole Gib Rail thing.
Bear in mind that Gib is quite expensive nowdays (with fletcher’s monopoly over pretty much our entire building industry) with speciality products, like noisline, being doubly so.
So maybe give it a bit and see what it’s like before pulling the trigger, a decent block wall with a good air gap packed with batts will cancel out the vast majority of regular household noise I feel.
Yeah good plan.
Getting closer to the move, reading some stuff around masonry walls online, and hearing some of the feedback on here, I’m leaning towards bjist moving in, and then seeing what we’re dealing with and going from there.