Electrical hum
Hi everyone,
Looking for some help here. We own a two family townhouse, bought gut renovated. Recently, our tenants have been hearing a faint but distinct low frequency hum in their bedroom, and it’s been driving them (and in turn me) crazy. It’s at times intermittent and at times constant.
We’ve tried killing every breaker in the house, and it persisted. I’m thinking that means it’s not related to the electric wiring in this house, and perhaps something coming from the house next door. The person living next door won’t let me go in there to have a look. The tenant is asking me to tear open the dry wall to have a look, but I’m thinking that won’t really help anything, and just be expensive and pointless.
Any ideas here? Has anyone experienced this? Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Guest User | 4 years and 8 months ago
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stevecym | 4 years and 7 months ago
I did some checks with my crappy old unit yesterday and it goes like this:
if you can hear something through the wall, even faintly, the machine will help you locate where it is and in my case got very loud when i was on it.
The downside of using this was, and this was big, it WILL pick up air borne noise and when you are trying to locate a sound, the air borne noise muddles it all and will override the noise you are listening for. it could be a car in the road or someone talking in your own house.
i hope you ordered one that has a flat reciever and not that pointed metal one, needle like. that thing is useless on a masonry wall. my set has one and i tried it.
and lastly, if you have to turn the sensitivity on the device up very high, your own breathing will interfere with it.
i wanted to share that with you before you open the package.
stevecym | 4 years and 7 months ago
Well good luck with it but before you open it, let me experiment with mine and report back. I cannot do that until sunday though. If you are like most people, you dont want all these tools around. I have them because i work on my cars and have a shop.
Guest User | 4 years and 7 months ago
Thank you – ordered.
stevecym | 4 years and 7 months ago
so that’s one of them. there are others. there is a $58 unit on there but the listening probe is very fine, almost needle like, and i wonder how that would work on masonry or drywall. its probably made more for the metal of an engine.
i don’t have time today, but maybe sunday i can get what i have out and have my son move a running drill and sander around behind a masonry wall and i will have him set them on the ground and hold them in the air while i listen with the device i have and i will let you know if i can differentiate between them and where their placement is. i want to be sure its not making just a big whirring noise but actually becomes clearer and less clear based on location, etc. you know how this kind of technology is: if my old one works, you know the modern stuff will be 10 time better.
Guest User | 4 years and 7 months ago
Hi Steve – can you link to the kind of listening device you’re referring to?
Thanks!
stevecym | 4 years and 7 months ago
i can clarify the point i make above with this:
the day before yesterday my neighbor shows up at my house upset that the overflow in his tub leaked. he spent yesterday texting questions about this and i was straight up with him and told him i have never installed a tub and do not know if you can access the overflow return from below but you might want to find access and maybe you can fix this yourself. well, more texts rolled in yesterday while i was at work and even more rolled in when i was at home sitting on the couch and then the phone starts ringing.- all this after i told him i do not know jack s*** about this situation. so i walked over to his house and he staring at a wet spot on a drywall ceiling in his kitchen. I asked him, :”what are you doing?” it was obvious what he was doing, NOTHING. i told him, “you have a tiled wall above and wet drywall down below, where is your first move?”. so he goes to get a jig saw to cut the already soaked drywall open (really?) and while he was gone i took a hammer he had laying there and busted the drywall open a nd told him see if he can get in there before calling a plumber and i walked out of his house.
the person i mention above has more education than half of us on here and has the intelligence to match. but he thought about the problem at hand for over 24 hours and with every thought he came up with five reasons why it might not work or might be hard to do. the problem still has to be fixed. at some point it is time to stop thinking and make a move. in his case, the wet drywall is easy to fix and has to be dealt with anyway, so that was the obvious move. and he might not realize it yet, but by breaking that sheetrock open, i did him the biggest favor anyone had done for him since his mommy taught him to tie his shoes.
if the op came back on here and said he/she was out of good ideas and wanted to find the source of the noise and was considering taking the step i suggest, i would see what i can tell through masonry walls at my own house. it will not identify what it is (or maybe it will, bubbling in a fish tank pump?), but i bet it can identify WHERE it is – probably within inches. these devices are between 60 and 100 dollars on amazon (yes, i just looked) and i bet a lot better than the 1970’s device i have. my thought is it is something in the apt next door and the tenant is not going to cooperate (and op probably thinks that as well and is wondering “why spend the money on something i will not use again” – i get that too).
stevecym | 4 years and 7 months ago
We certainly have a lot of thinkers on here.
Guest User | 4 years and 7 months ago
Very useful post
Guest User | 4 years and 7 months ago
Very useful post
hkapstein | 4 years and 7 months ago
Oddly enough, the problem could actually be that the apt is too quiet.
helen40
in General Discussion 4 years and 7 months ago
This noise/vibration could be coming from nearly anything from almost anywhere in the attached house or even further away. It may seem to be emanating from behind the wall, but it could be traveling down a pipe, for example, and manifesting itself next to your tenant’s space. If you care that much about keeping this tenant who is making you crazy, It sounds like you will need access to your neighbors, if allowed, and maybe the services of a sound engineer who can try to solve the problem with or w/o that access.
I have noticed many more house sounds and vibrations given the greater amount of time I have been home, and the relatively low level of activity in residential and commercial property nearby. A nearby roof fan for a restaurant I never noticed before now sounds like a jet engine as there are so many fewer fans running. So could this be a long-standing but only now apparent noise.
If you have not had tenants before, you will learn from experience that some are much more needy than others. It seems you have a very needy tenant who expects a perfect apartmen t and a landlord who will solve all of their perceived problems. These are not good tenants in the long run (or in your case, the short run) and if you think you can lease in this market, give them the option to leave early. Or wait until the end and dont offer them a renewal.
Good luck.
cate | 4 years and 7 months ago
I don’t think you can narrow it down to a cause such as a joist or a bit of missing mortar and fix that. The point is, noise can be heard through party walls of row houses. (In all sorts of odd and mysterious ways.) It’s very likely a device is making vibrations and simply needs to be put on a thick towel on a table and/or moved across a room. (Possibly a rug in the room where the tenants are hearing the noise might help as well to absorb a bit of the sound — or not.)
stevecym | 4 years and 7 months ago
I mentioned an electronic listening device. Have you investigated getting such a thing? If that is coming through a particular joist or set of them, something like this will narrow it down. Even if it is not coming through the joists but simply through the wall, something like this will narrow down the wall and even part of the wall so you can see if it is coming from the neighboring house.
You may not find out what this is, but there are ways to eliminate what and where the sound isnt from and this could lead you to where it is.
I kind of get it, you dont want to buy a tool. But coming from someone who has worked with tools all his life and buys them whenever a need arises, i see the value in such a purchase.
If you are afraid this might not help isolate the noise, perhaps later i can put something running, a drill or motor on the other side of a brick wall here and see how close i can pinpoint the sound with the low technology device i have and rep ort back. So let me know if you are interested.
Also, if this sound is airborne and not coming through the wall, a listening device may not work.
Guest User | 4 years and 7 months ago
Thanks Cate – that’s good to know. How could I try to validate if that’s the issue here?
cate | 4 years and 7 months ago
OP, one of the many ways noise and vibrations are conveyed in Brooklyn row houses is that joists touch inside pockets in the brick party walls.
cate | 4 years and 7 months ago
Sounds like a bit of a nightmare with your new neighbors, Brokelin. Hope the situation improves.
brokelin | 4 years and 7 months ago
The thing that is most annoying about hums is that what creates them usually cause vibrations as well. You can use white noise to block out noise, but it will do nothing about the vibrations.
I once had an apartment that was half a floor of what was originally a single family house, and when new neighbors moved in and placed their stereo speakers on the floor of the room right next to my bedroom, I could feel the bass they produced travel along the floorboards and vibrate my bed at night. Luckily, they were considerate neighbors, who either then turned down the bass dial, or moved the speakers off the floor, as I suggested might work, and the problem was solved.
The same issue is often the case with neighbors above. I had neighbors who used a small room humidifier on the floor above my bedroom – turns out the kind that use electrostatic charge to make the mist seem silent, but cause the floorboards under them to vibrate. Moving the source of the vibration off the floor solved that problem as well. Same neighbors also at one point made my entire bedroom vibrate at night by running the fan of the very old window AC in the winter – one needed the noise to cover the other’s snoring – and the windows and walls in the 100+ year old building shook, rattled and vibrated – the noise wasn’t a problem in the summer when every unit had its own bedroom window AC doing the same thing, creating their own noise and vibrations, but in the quiet winter, it made it hard to sleep. An actual white noise machine, not one the floor, would solve the problem without creating a problem for people in other apartments.
I’ve got something above me now that gets turned on at night above my bed that makes noise (that I can cancel out with music) and makes me vibrate (which I can’t cancel out and makes it hard to sleep) – I’m not sure if it is a noise machine, a humidifier, an air purifier, or an apparatus to assist breathing – it is clearly something related to sleeping, as I hear it when it gets turned on and off. Haven’t met those neighbors in this larger building yet, but from nasty notes from them about running my W/D hours before the night quiet hours start, because I was at work in the day. time (I don’t think they’ve ever lived in a multi-family building before, but have downsized from having a suburban house, and go to sleep at 7 p.m. and start stomping around on their rugless floors between 4 and 5 a.m.) I don’t expect them to be cooperative, so I’m sleeping badly for now, and dreaming of a living on a top floor again, or dreaming about living in a detached house for the first time ever in my adult life so I can sleep – I’ve had that kind of neighbor before, the kind who think nothing of keeping you up all night but who complain about the smallest noise you make just because they hear that someone is living there.
Your next door neighbor might not want to let you in (I can kinda understand that), but may be cooperative enough if you suggest that something running with a motor could either be moved to elsewhere in the room, away from that side, or, more likely I think, moved off the floor onto a table with padding – though if on the floor, the offending motor could be anywhere in the room, not just near that wall. It might be worth asking the neighbors to find and remedy the problem themselves by perhaps moving something with a motor, so your tenants can sleep. Though maybe they have a grow room or something set up, and it won’t change.
If they truly love the place, your tenants could resort to what I did when I had a blissfully quiet top floor unit, until the city started jackhammering the cement up in the schoolyard next door every day, hours before I usually awoke. After a few weeks of being rudely awaken by that noise, I got some of those soft foam earplugs with the highest decibel rating I could find (they have them at drugstores), and was then able to sleep as late as I wanted, while noisy construction progressed outside for months.
cate | 4 years and 7 months ago
It’s probably just something like a fish tank, fridge, air purifier, white noise machine or something like that on the other side. Tearing open the plaster/drywall is likely to reveal only the brick party wall.
colonialrevival | 4 years and 7 months ago
When hypotheticals keep leading to dead ends, that’s usually a cue that I need to learn more about what’s actually going on. In this case, I’d grab an oscillating saw and cut a small (6″x6″ square in the drywall over the point where it’s the loudest, and retain the piece for easy patching later.