"tony sayer" wrote in message
...
In article ,
RobertL scribeth thus
On Sunday, December 9, 2012 2:42:18 PM UTC, Geoff Pearson wrote:
I am thinking of improving the floor insulation of my house. Under the
ground floor of my 1897 stone-built house in Edinburgh I have a space
about
1.6m high under all the rooms so access for work is very good. My
energy
bills (gas+electricity) are about £2800 a year.



The floor is a standard Edinburgh floor: 11 inch joists with the space
between filled with ash and covered in plaster, supported on riven
wooden
strips, themselves supported on battens along the joists. This
deafening

Forgive me for repeating this story if you read it before.

The architect Hope Bagnell once described the sound insulation of Glasgow
tenements (with sand/ash filling between joists) and compared it to that
in
(1960s) buildings. He said "in Victorian times it was boasted that you
could
not hear a baby being born in the room above. These days you can hear it
being
conceived".

Robert



Humm.. Well sometimes .. the relative noise levels aren't that far
apart..

Don't suppose anyone's done any peer reviewed papers on the subject?,.

Acoustic insulation in tenement buildings that is of course;!?...
--
Tony Sayer





A lot of sound insulation comes from mass: the doors here and in my previous
Georgian flats are and were vast and thick. In Dundas Street we had
flagstone floors in the kitchen and hall: when the sun shone on them during
the day they were still warm to the touch the next morning. One flagstone
had to be lifted and showed the floor to be about 6 inches thick - 2nd floor
flat - where the kitchen was 8 metres by 5 - so several tonnes of stone, I
reckon.