I can hear my neighbours, the lift, the installations, the downpipes, etc. far too much, and I think our partition walls do not meet the legal sound insulation requirements.
The LOE sets out the basic requirements that new-build homes must meet to guarantee people’s safety and comfort.
Among the mandatory habitability requirements is the basic requirement of “Protection against noise”, which consists of limiting, within buildings and under normal conditions of use, the risk of nuisance or illness that noise may cause to users as a result of the characteristics of the building’s design, construction, use and maintenance.
To meet this objective, buildings shall be designed, built and maintained so that the building elements forming their rooms have suitable acoustic characteristics to reduce the transmission of airborne noise, impact noise, and noise and vibration from the building’s own installations, and to limit reverberant noise in the rooms (Article 14 of the CTE).
This is why the Technical Building Code sets out the basic requirements that buildings must meet to provide this protection against noise.
These are general conditions and extensive basic documents that set out both the minimum sound insulation requirements for each wall depending on the type of property and, within it, whether it is a habitable room, protected room, activity room, plant room, communal area, etc., as well as the procedure for checking them.
In most cases, the airborne sound insulation of a room in a home cannot be less than 50 dBA.
Besides walls having poor sound insulation, there may be cases where they were not built properly or the appropriate insulating materials were not even installed (polyurethane foam, rock wool, glass fibre, cork, etc.), or where so-called acoustic bridges connecting with adjacent homes were not avoided, such as gaps in walls or floor slabs, downpipes, ventilation shunts, switch boxes, junction boxes and electrical panels.
If you believe that these minimum noise protection requirements have not been respected in your new-build building, and you can hear the downpipes, your neighbours’ conversations and even the faintest sounds, contact us for a quote so that an expert can visit your building and carry out the relevant tests with sound level meters, open an inspection hole to check whether or not this essential habitability requirement is met, and, where appropriate, claim against those responsible.
Any questions?