Options for Sound proof Windows without replacement

I have a noise problem with a condo I am renting. Two years ago, without my knowledge, the city approved a school to be situated next to our condo complex. It turned out the kids (K-9) at the school make so much noise that caused my tenants to move out, they can no longer endure the noise after two years. My condo is directly facing the playgrounds of the school, about 20 feet away, just above the concrete wall on the 2nd floor. On that side facing the playground there are two huge patio doors and two large windows like 4’ x 4’.

I understand there are many sound proof products for the windows/patios, but I am not sure they can be effective about the patio doors. I would still want the openings functional after the sound proof products being installed. Replacing the windows are not an option as it require HOA three months time for approval and it will extremely expensive to match the stucco and paint. What are your experiences?

I am no help on the soundproofing, but I can’t imagine that every tenant would object to noise that is basically confined to school hours. Some people just don’t like children. When we bought our first house, we found all these “child-cancelling” features installed by some previous owners (blinds that hung from one end of the porch to block them from view, for example, and triple paned windows on the side facing the house with 4 children). These were perfectly well-behaved children and they didn’t bother us one bit. We concluded that the previous owners were curmudgeons.

Ask @coralbrook what folks do in the flight path in San Diego!

How about offering slightly discounted rent to a teacher at the school? He or she would be absent during recess time. Cheaper than installing new windows and patio doors, which is about the only thing that will work…

Can’t imagine any renter who works 9-5 complaining about elementary school noise! :slight_smile:

My hurricane proof windows and doors block almost all outside noises.

Check this out: https://indowwindows.com/performance/

@artloversplus

I hate to say it…but I think your renters were looking for an excuse to move out.

As noted, elementary school recess is NOT all day long. It’s from mid morning to mid afternoon. And really, recess noises are happy sounds. And these are little voices although a lot of them.

I worked at a school where 125 kids were at recess at the same time. Recess was from 11 a.m. to 1 pm. Near lunchtime.

Unless they were working third shift, this school noise during the day…shouldn’t have been an issue.

Is everyone else moving out of the building? I bet not.

Some people are extremely sound sensitive, others not so much. Third shift sleepers, well that is another issue. There also may be after school outdoor activities that cause noise late afternoon and into the evenings. If there is sufficient space between the school and the condo, could come tall evergreen trees be planted that would at least eventually be a bit noise absorbing? Sound can bounce in odd ways against hard surfaces and concrete walls would not be helpful.

My neighborhood, with close up houses has had an influx of summer concerts in recent years, and the heated discussions over tolerable volume and sound acoustics are long and involved. People really vary in their tolerance. Renting to an older demographic with a degree of hearing loss would also work well.

So what’s the actual distance? Have to ask–20 feet would be pretty darn too close.
I think your tenants are making excuses. The next ones will hopefully be more forgiving.

New tenants will see right away that they are moving in next to a school which will have noise during the day. I agree with others that your previous tenants were looking for a way out.

I frankly wouldn’t care so much about noise, but additional traffic for pick up and drop off may bother me.

I am sorry that I was not clear in the OP.

I am only interested to know if there is a way to reduce noise, not to extrapolate why the tenants moved out.

And I can assure you the noise is real. My tenant informed me about the noise year and half ago that those teenagers do not behave well and we had given them the option to move out then and there. They stayed on for two years and they are very nice people, very clean and pay rent on time, there is no reason why they would lie to me. In addition, the other floor tenants( they are owners, not renters) also have complaints. Since it is city approved use, we cannot do any thing about it. My tenants are retirees, stay home most of the time, so the noise does effect them. They are also multi-millionaires, who sold their large home and moved into my unit to downsize and make life simpler.

There is no way the teachers can afford our unit as it is in a high rent area around San Francisco. Most tenants are high income tech company employees or Doctors.

The patio doors are likely to be tougher than the windows.

Basically, what we do in the north to cut down on the transmission of cold through windows and doors at least helps some against noise also. Largely this includes having more layers of glass between the inside and the outside.

For windows you can purchase at hardware stores (or at least could get if you were in a more northern location) storm windows that attach to the outside of the house outside of the current windows. However, getting the right size takes some care. We did three windows a few years ago and needed to carefully measure and get custom storm windows made for us. The local Home Depot or Lowe’s can do this and the cost is not too bad as long as the window can just be flush mounted to the existing trim. I mounted the storm windows myself. You can get windows with a single solid glass sheet which cannot be moved, or for a bit more can get windows where the glass is in two pieces, and the lower one can slide up and be replaced by a screen.

Unfortunately this doesn’t work for sliding glass doors. For those, we did in one case need to get them replaced. This is a relatively big deal even with a wood sided building where trim can be easily cut to size. If you get sliding doors that are meant for cold climate they will have at least two panes of glass, sometimes three for high end doors, which will be better than one pane.

I don’t think that any of this will be perfect. It will help some.

Another thing that might help some is to put a tall solid fence right on the property border. I am pretty sure that you need to put it on your side of the property line, and be careful that you actually do know where the property line is. I suppose that you could try to get the school to put one in on their side of the boundary.

By the way, insulating walls also reduces the transmission of sound through the walls. This is however hard to do on existing walls (much easier to do when initially building).

I doubt that building codes in California are quite up to New England or Minnesota standards with regarding to windows, doors, and insulation. I will admit however that I have not looked closely at California buildings for quite a while. I think that I had single pane windows when I lived out there, which you definitely don’t want if noise is an issue.

Also in the cold parts of the USA (and of course in our colder neighbor to the north) you can get blinds that roll down over the windows and doors. If you get ones that are meant to protect against cold in the north, they will also cut down on noise. These can be lowered or raised relatively easily (or at least the ones we have can be). Some have a honeycomb cross section which again implies two layers, which will help more against cold (where we live) or noise (where you live) compared to a single layer.

@DadTwoGirls

This is a condo…I doubt that the owner can put up storm windows on the outside of the windows without condo association approval.

I don’t know about windows but can comment on possibly using new sheet rock. I recently put up (inside over the old sheetrock) QuietRock. It is about 6x as expensive and is very heavy. However it seriously seriously cuts down on noise transmission (like 800% or something). We did one side of our rental condo (about 40 feet) installed cost about $2000. But those noisy neighbors over there made me nuts.

Wondering could you get those security blinds/roll down shades? Sounds like maybe you need to go to the next HOA meeting with whomever else you can round up to try to get some answers on possible changes etc. Maybe propose the HOA build up the wall as a capital expense as that kind of noise will lower property values.

If using QuietRock don’t use QuietRock 530 and QuietRock 545 which contain a layer of steel and may cause issues with wireless reception.

I don’t know this product, but it might help: https://indowwindows.com/portfolio/window-noise-reduction/ It looks like it goes on the insides of windows.

Indeed, from the video in your link for post #16 it does look like this product is installed on the inside of the windows and it appears to significantly reduce noise.

It does warn that it won’t be as effective if the sound is coming through walls and doors, of course. (For our home with single wall construction, likely not nearly as effective as folks who have double wall construction with insulation in the walls.)