Anybody know anything about annoying low-frequency environmental noise?

[Globalti]

My Mum aged 81 is being driven mad by a low frequency throbbing noise, which she can hear at certain times of the day in her very old cottage. Others have heard it so tinnitus has been eliminated. A plumber thought it could be a fluttering ballcock valve and she has had the header tank valve replaced and the WC valves checked but still it goes on at certain unpredictable times. She is sleeping badly and taking tranquillisers now to help her cope. Environmental Health have been and dismissed it as "old folk" because the bloke couldn't hear anything at that time.

Because she lives five hours driving away down in Wiltshire I haven't been down but I plan to go next weekend and try to get to the bottom of it. I don't live there so I have no fear of nipping round to see the adjoining neighbour about their built-in fridge/freezer, their pond pump or whatever. It's either got to be some compressor or pump noise coming through the structure of the building or she is at the nodal point of some environmental noise (a company nearby makes frozen food and the refrigerated vans are parked up with compressors running) where sound waves are overlapping and producing harmonics.​

Does anybody know anything about this kind of thing and does anybody have any literature I can read before I go? I am going to ask the Environment bloke to meet me there on Monday morning. All suggestions appreciated.​

​

 

[Red Light]

Try the:
Low Frequency Noise Sufferers Association
Laundry Cottage
Home Farm
Leicester Road
Thornhaugh
Peterborough
PE8 6NL
Tel: 01780 783416

 

[Globalti]

Excellent, thanks! That got me some interesting links, which I have emailed on to her. I hadn't realised it was so widely discussed.

I sympathise because I used to hear it when we lived in another town. It didn't bother me but it was absolutely clear to me.

 

[gbb]

My sympathies to her GTi, when it happens you're intensly aware of it.
Can she put a timescale to it, has anything changed at the point she noticed it ?
Some years ago i had an annoying low pitched 'eeeeeeeeeeeee' sound in my living room. It annoyed me for the best part of a day. I walked round the room and tried to localise it, it seemed to be coming from a corner....cocked my ear to figure what it was. I'm stood in the corner of the room looking at a painting on the wall, touched the frame.....and it stopped. WOW !!!
Must have been some background vibration that set it off, i guess sometimes you'll never know what it was.

 

[col]

I had this at my last house, it drove me crazy. It seemed to be coming from the fireplace where our backboiler was. So with everything turned off it was still audible. My neighbours were great when I explained and asked if there was anything of theirs the other side of the wall. There wasnt, it was just their stairs and a clear wall above and below, they let me check. I still dont know what caused it.

 

[ufkacbln]

Does she keep a diary?

Sounds daft, but it does enable you to identify times and dates. If you can establish a pattern then that will help you identify this

As for believing people.... I was at an Air Station and someone bought a house near the "Navigation Radome"

They claimed that it kept them awake and was a real nuisance. We insisted that it could not be heard by humans and there was therfore no problem. Then we agreed to a diary and they matched the times of use exactly!

 

[ColinJ]

I hear an odd noise now-and-then which I now think is due to an appliance mounted on my neighbour's kitchen wall. It's not loud enough to annoy me, but I can sometimes hear it in my kitchen or on the landing upstairs.

Good luck with sorting your mum's problem out!

My late mum complained of a problem which seemed to wake her every night and then she couldn't get back to sleep. We couldn't hear anything in her sheltered flat so we thought that it was probably related to her Parkinsons or the numerous different interacting medications she was on.

She died last year and my sisters and I decided which of us would keep which of her possessions. It was when I brought her bedroom clock oop north that I discovered the problem which used to wake her. It turns out that the clock has a mechanical calendar display which flips over with a loud clunk at midnight! It's a sharp noise which is loud enough to wake you, but which is finished so quickly that you don't know what caused you to wake up.

I'm usually watching TV at midnight in the room with the clock in, and most nights I am startled by that sound.

PS I've just thought ... I usually have my computer on all day in my attic bedroom/office. Even down 2 floors down, in the kitchen, I can hear the rumbling of the PC fans through the floors and walls. My PC isn't particularly noisy and my hearing isn't great, but the frequencies it generates really seem to travel well.

 

[Night Train]

Many years ago we used to get a 'chirp' every now and again. Took us months to track it down to an old smoke detector that had been put away. The batteries were going flat and the chirp was a warning to change the batteries.

Dad has been complaining of a noise at night, two quiet bangs. We've not tracked that down yet after a couple of years of trying. I thought it was the fire doors in the house next door, that I can hear, but he can hear them too and says it not that noise.

 

[ColinJ]

Many years ago we used to get a 'chirp' every now and again. Took us months to track it down to an old smoke detector that had been put away. The batteries were going flat and the chirp was a warning to change the batteries.

Ho ho - I've had that one too!

When my parents became very old and frail, we subscribed them to a monitoring service which supplied a special phone and alert bracelets for them. If they felt ill (or had a fall) and needed help, they could press the button on their bracelet which would activate the phone. The phone was pre-programmed to ring round various family members' numbers until someone took the call. If nobody answered after a certain number of attempts, an operator at the monitoring service would take over. The phone had a loudspeaker in it through which the family member or operator could try to speak to my parents even if they couldn't physically get to the phone.

My dad started pressing the alarm button nearly every day. We told him to do it once a week to test it, but really, it was for emergencies only!

Then one day at about 2 am, my dad set the alarm off again. My brother-in-law took the call and heard my father whispering ... "There is an intruder in the house - we can hear voices coming from downstairs!" B-i-l jumped on his bike and was up at my parents' house within a few minutes. There were no lights on. He used his spare key to let himself in and ... heard a man's voice coming from the lounge! He threw the door open, prepared to confront the intruder, but the room was empty!

An insistent automated message was coming from the loudspeaker in the phone - "The batteries in this telephone need changing - please do so immediately!"

It was pretty funny at the time, but actually - what a stupid idea! Isn't that exactly how vulnerable people would react to a mystery voice in the middle of the night? The phone should have been programmed to phone round the family numbers during daylight hours to tell one of them that the batteries needed changing!

 

[Night Train]

^^^

I've had the same sort of thing when I was working with the elderly.
I used to have to call up each resident, on the same emergency call type phone, and ask if they were ok.

I called one new chap, who had only recently moved and he didn't respond to me but I could hear him in the back ground, doing chores or something, mumbling about hearing voices and wishing they would go away.

I had to visit to explain to him it was only me, or the other staff cheking he was ok.

 

[ColinJ]

I called one new chap, who had only recently moved and he didn't respond to me but I could hear him in the back ground, doing chores or something, mumbling about hearing voices and wishing they would go away.

Most people having problems with 'voices' imagine them but think they are real - your chap heard a real voice but thought it was imaginary - priceless!

 

[ianrauk]

also check the electricity meter. My MIL also had a problem with a low pitched hum in her new house. We finally traced it to the meter. We got the meter changed and that stopped the humming.

 

[Zoiders]

This is known in popular culture as "The Hum"

It's been experienced by people in various locations around the globe such as New Mexico and as to date no one has actually proved if it exists and if it does exist what is causing it.

It's not a phenomena they have managed to record or detect.

 

[slowmotion]

I dimly remember reading a long time ago that some people reckon it is caused by large diameter underground gas pipelines.

 

[PBancroft]

On our estate there are a lot of people who own cats. Equally, there are a lot of people who seem to dislike cats as every other house seems to have one of those high pitched cat scarers. The whistling is incessant but nobody else seems to notice it...