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Originally Posted by SarFred
We have recently moved here and love our villa, but the transformer in the back yard buzzes incessantly. When we open the window to the second room it's really bad. The transformer is situated behind our house, not in between, and that's fine but what they have is fencing behind the transformer, which makes it into kind of an echo chamber. We have called Seico to come out and see if it's just loose, but can anyone suggest other avenues to pursue? We could and would put a matching fence in front of it to block the sound. Any suggestions from seasoned villagers?
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Our home backs up to Villas and we have a transformer against the wall between us and the neighbor. Indeed they make a noticable hum. The main culprit as you have pointed out is the echo effect of the wall and it is very quiet where we live. We called SECO and they were very responsive. They came out and replaced the unit. That did not help, so someone with a larger title came out. He agreed it was a bit noisy, so they replaced the unit again. There was no noticable affect. They came back and put a rubber mat under the unit thinking that may lessen the vibration. Hard for me to tell if that made a difference.
I also found a site soundproofing.com that has some interesting forums. Check out the threads on soundproofing a generator.
I did get one private reply on their site, but took no action:
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Hello,
I know it's been a while since you posted to the supersoundproofing forum, but I just was reading your post.
I work for a large power company, and thought I might add my 2 cents!
A couple things could be done easily to possibly quiet the offending transformer.
1. Ask the power company if they could demagnetize the transformer- this sometimes quiets them right down. Also see if they can test it for noise and see if it meets manufacturer's specs.
2. If it were one of those really big (the size of a small house-BIG!)transformers like my company uses and it were unusually loud, we have a special electronic device we have attached to one of ours, which injects an inverse wave voltage into the transformer which cancelled out the harmonic which was causing the hum. The device is an active audio device which listens to the transformer with microphones and automatically adjusts itself to minimize the hum.
Perhaps you could get an active noise suppression device and attach it to your house.
Another possible idea is Dynamat- available at car audio stores. You could try sticking small squares of it to the outside of the transformer. To find the best places to stick a small amount of it at a time, press your hand against the side of the transformer box in various locations and have your spouse/etc listen from near your house and see if they can hear a difference.
My experience in the Navy Seabees with portable power generators, it was amazing the difference in sound transmission when we simply grabbed a convenient piece of plywood and leaned it up against the generator, deflecting a significant amount of its noise away from our camp. My apologies for the long post!
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In the end we did some nice landscaping, (out of sight out of mind?) and do our best to ignore it. If you have better luck I would be very intereted in hearing.
Alan