Soundproofing your home so that the neighbours don’t bother you – nor you them – isn’t difficult. Good insulation materials with shock-absorbing properties will deaden sound, and ensure that nobody suffers unwanted noise. However, one area of the home that can go overlooked in terms of ensuring privacy is your conservatory.
Having an all-season area as part of your home not only adds value and space, it’s more versatile than a standard extension, enabling you to enjoy your garden all year round. However, the acoustic tricks played by all that glass can at best make the space unbearably noisy during a rain or hailstorm, and at worst, amplify any sounds you yourself make inside the covered area, broadcasting music, television, and conversation sounds to your near neighbours.
So what can you do to improve the situation? Although conventional methods of soundproofing won’t work or be appropriate for a conservatory, it’s not impossible to cut sound ingress and egress considerably. That’s not to say that you won’t face one or two problems when looking at soundproofing solutions – glass covers can range from clunky to downright ugly, and heavy curtains and thick carpets, although perfect in a plush living room, might not be quite what you had envisaged in an outdoor-indoor area, with clean lines, blinds at the windows, and wooden or stone floors.
There are soundproofing solutions for your conservatory that maintain the look of a garden room, and yet still keep noise pollution to a minimum. The best place to start is the roof; standard roofing materials for conservatories tend to be polycarbons. Whilst durable, they offer almost no sound insulation whatsoever – for example, sitting inside a conservatory with a single-wall polycarbon roof during a hailstorm can be likened to sitting inside a dustbin whilst someone throws pebbles at it. Watching television or listening to music is impossible, and conversation can only be conducted at a steady shout. A double or even triple-layer roof with a gap in-between each can make a lot of difference.
Just as double and triple glazing can dull traffic noise from the street at the front of your house, so can layered glazing in your conservatory windows and doors. Whilst not cheap, it works, and it’s a good solution for making sure that you really can use the room year round, even when there’s thick snow on the ground in your back garden. It can also greatly improve the structure’s energy efficiency so it’ll cost less to heat too.