Acoustic Fencing

If you live in a particularly quiet part of the world, you may not see the benefits of soundproofing your garden with acoustic fencing boards. However, many people live in busy neighbourhoods, near schools, venues, busy roads, or railway lines, which will all make an abnormal amount of noise, making it harder to enjoy your garden space as a peaceful outdoor escape.

In extreme situations, unwanted noise pollution can even prove to be potentially harmful. If you were to live next to an ongoing building site for example, continued machine noise could become detrimental to your health, as sustained noise over a certain amount of decibels will cause irreparable damage to your hearing. This is why it is important to consider taking steps to limit the amount of external noise that enters your garden, including the installation of acoustic fence panels.

NeoTimber’s composite fencing can help to create a rigid acoustic fence simply by acting as a preventative sound barrier, limiting the sound substantially before it reaches you. The effectiveness of this sound barrier will depend on the size of your garden – if you have smaller garden, the sound will have less time to fade before it reaches you, for example. Thankfully, the tongue and groove system of NeoTimber’s acoustic fencing boards are gapless, which will allow less sound to pass through.

There are other steps you can take to create a more soundproof garden, including placing more hedgerows and planting in front of your fencing. If your home is on a hill or a raised slant, placing your fencing or planting higher up will help act as a barrier to more natural sounds, such as the wind. Simple additions such as water features can also help to drown out unwanted noises.

The acoustic properties of our assembled fencing panels were tested (ASTM E90-09 & ASTM E413-10 method) in a controlled, soundproof laboratory environment. The completed composite fence system is mounted in the middle of a concrete wall, between the source of the noise and the receiving microphone. Sounds of varying frequency are then played through a speaker on one side of the fence, with measurements taken from the microphone to determine the sound reduction achieved.

The test was conducted with an increasing amount of volume, to determine the overall average of noise reduction effectiveness of our composite fencing. Once the test was completed, the final results concluded that NeoTimber’s composite fencing had a STC (Sound Transmission Class) rating of 29 decibels. This means that our fencing helps reduce noise by an average of 29 decibels, which is generally higher when compared to other acoustic fencing products on the market.