We recently had a heat pump installed primarily for cooling. The indoor unit is located on the upper floor and the outdoor unit is on the gable about 6 meters from the neighbor's garage. We thought it wouldn't disturb anyone there, as the location is about 25 meters from their patio. However, their garage is set back further on the property than ours, and they are experiencing the pump's humming on their front patio, mainly in the evenings when we plan to run it for a few hours to get reasonable cooling upstairs. It's as if the sound is bouncing between our gable and their garage, amplifying it. It’s obviously quite loud when you're on their property a few meters from the heat pump, but I’m not sure how I can improve that. There are plenty of heat pumps in the area that are fully exposed. Maybe ours is louder than other models, I don’t know, it’s our first heat pump. Our priority was, in any case, to keep it away from both our and the neighbor's houses or patios.
The neighbor suggested a screen but couldn't specify how to best build one.
Does anyone know how to best build a screen wall that effectively "eats up" the noise, so that it doesn't bounce further? I was thinking of a construction with weatherboard on the outside against standing 45x45 or similar, then a 45 mm polystyrene board in the middle and regular panel on the inside, which you don’t see anyway, so it doesn’t need to be pretty. Should the inside be covered with some kind of horizontal slats or similar to absorb the sound? Of course, with angled slats so that air can flow through the pump, not a completely closed box.
I also wondered if we could build some kind of sound absorber to place on our facade to further absorb any noise.
We obviously want the sound to be reduced as much as possible, both for the neighbor and for ourselves. We have, I think, a good relationship with our neighbors and want to keep them as happy as possible. This is probably the first time in 10 years the neighbors have complained about something, so they’re not chronic complainers.
Grateful for help. I’ve googled and searched the subject but haven’t found anything specifically for this purpose.
