Decibels

There's an app for everything, and I have a phone app that measures sound in decibels. Like health tracking apps and geo locators on the watch, it's not a precision instrument but it does a pretty accurate job of measurement for my purposes.

And my purposes were to see how loud it really was when the furnace ran. As with many homes built on a slab with no attic, no attached garage and no basement, our system had to be put in a closet in the middle of the house. 

When we are in our living room we sit only a few feet away from the bellowing beast that heats and cools our box of a home. The furnace closet shares the wall the bed is against in the bedroom.

The phone app says standing at the closet, with doors closed, it's 65 decibels, and sitting in the living room a few feet away we are surrounded by 55 - 56 decibels when it's running. 

55 decibels is equivalent to human conversation . . . but of course conversation is intermittent, with pauses and fluctuations. The furnace is constant, without pause running for a long time until it shuts off (and comes back on, which it does all the time. It's winter.) It's as loud as talking but in an unceasing drone, so that real conversation has to be yelled at 60 decibels to be heard over it.

The decibel scale is logarithmic, like hurricane ratings, so 55 is 10 times louder than 45, which is ambient noise indoors when the furnace shuts off but appliances hum and birds sing far away and people move in the house. A 10 decibel reduction is perceived by the human ear as half as loud.

Our system is 25 years old, installed in 2000 when the house was built. HVAC systems last 10 to 15 years, 20 years if well maintained. Our neighbors had an emergency with theirs, also the original installed system, and we don't want to be shopping for something so major when it's urgent.

So we are getting a new HVAC system that will be way more efficient, heat more evenly, use less gas, filter dust electrostically (a huge plus in this climate), and because it runs at variable and lower air blower speeds, it will be quieter. 

Blessedly so, I hope. Even just a few decibels quieter on the logarithmic scale will make a big difference.