Soundproofing spray foam insulation in Stony Plain has to deal with two building types that carry sound in opposite ways, because the older streets here are plaster and small rooms and the newer phases are engineered floors and open space.
Heavy and divided, against light and open
An older house here is a set of separate rooms with doors between them, plaster on lath, and solid floor joists. It stops airborne sound well and transmits impact readily, so the complaint is footsteps and doors rather than voices. A newer house is the reverse: light engineered floors that span further, an open main level, and an open stair, so voices and television travel freely while the structure itself is less of a path. Treating one like the other is the commonest wasted spend in this work.
What actually carries it in an older house
The paths in the older stock are structural and they are rarely the wall somebody is standing beside. A stair open at both ends, a floor cavity that runs the length of the building, a chimney chase, and the gaps around old doors that never fitted well. Plaster is a good barrier and the sound is going around it rather than through it. That is why opening a wall in one of these houses frequently achieves very little and why the path is established before anything is opened.
What carries it in a house from the newer phases
There the paths are services and openings. A duct serving two bedrooms is a direct air connection between them. A return air path above a door does the same. An open-web floor truss lets sound entering the floor in one room leave it two rooms away, which is why treating the ceiling directly under the noise sometimes changes nothing. At least one of those is usually doing more than any wall, and none of them is fixed by insulation.
A wall between two households is a different standard from one between two rooms
The older stock here contains suites, and a wall separating two households is not the same problem as a wall between a bedroom and a living room. The expectation is higher, the noise runs at hours nobody chooses, and the parties either side of it have no way of coordinating with each other. It is also frequently a wall that was never built as a separation at all, because the suite was created inside a house that had been a single dwelling. That means the honest scope usually includes the floor and the ceiling as well as the wall, since sound in an older house travels around a barrier rather than through it. Where the foam goes into an occupied Stony Plain room it is covered by a thermal barrier, which in practice is the drywall going back on, so the making good belongs in the quote. More on thermal barrier vs ignition barrier.
Soundproofing Spray Foam Insulation Stony Plain: Common Questions
Which is worse, the old houses or the new? Neither. They carry sound in opposite ways and they need opposite work.
Will this stop footsteps? Only partly. Impact travels through the structure and it is the hardest thing to treat.
Can you tell where it is coming from? Usually in one visit, and that visit decides whether there is a job worth doing at all.
Size the assembly with the R-value calculator, then get a free Stony Plain quote. More on Soundproofing Spray Foam Insulation Alberta.