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Cumber Homes are built with very high specification party walls. With most new homes sounds like telephones and even light switches being turned on and off can penetrate from next door. Part of the secret of our success is our use of timber frame construction - the type of construction used in Scandinavia and the USA - which has been shown by the governments Building Research Establishment to give consistently better soundproofing for party walls than you get with normal blockwork . |
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The wall in this photo is a party wall. It is two
walls set close together. The diagonal timber is a temporary support.
The next step is for fireproofing to be added to one side of the wall. Party walls always get especially thick fireproofing - more than double what other walls get. |
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| This photo shows the wall after the plasterboard
fireproofing has been put on. You can see the layer of polythene put behind
the fireproofing.
Next comes insulation.
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To ensure the highest possible
performance we put a full 8" of insulation into a party wall. This is four times the legal minimum.
At the start of our development we tested various different specifications and found the best results were achieved with this level of insulation. That is what we then settled on as standard. |
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A party wall ends up over a foot thick with:
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When a sound hits the wall on one side it tries to make it
vibrate. Because the plasterboard is heavy it only vibrates a little. The
vibration is then transferred to the air in the cavity, but with very little
energy because the insulation absorbs much of the vibration.
The air has too little energy to transfer much to the wall the other side. Its exactly the same principle as for double glazing, which many people know to cut out sound. |
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Really excellent results rely on an attention to detail. One of our secrets is that we ensure that the walls of each dwelling have a true clear cavity between them. Mostly party walls have a pattern of metal wallties joining them, which is bad news for sound insulation. The wallties transfer vibrations in one wall straight through to the other one. Just imagine hitting one wall with a hammer - both walls will vibrate. With timber frame construction the wall is strong enough to stand on its own and ties between the walls may if desired be omitted. The clear cavity which can result significantly improves soundproofing. Having good soundproofing allows us to link dwellings more often, this means you have less outside wall to paint, fewer gutters to clean and less heat loss through external walls. A Mark 2 bungalow for example has just 11 yards of gutter in total - including both the front and rear of the dwelling! You can paint all the outside walls in a couple of hours. Ease of maintenance is a key factor for many of our purchasers. We suggest that you ask a few residents how they find the soundproofing between dwellings when you visit.
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