Spend an afternoon house hunting in this part of Surrey and somebody will raise it before you’ve finished the first viewing. A good deal of the county sits under the approach and departure routes into Heathrow, Gatwick traffic crosses to the south and east, and Farnborough adds business jets to the mix around Camberley and Farnborough itself. On a clear day with the wind sitting the wrong way, some roads hear aircraft from before breakfast until well after dark.
Most people make their peace with it, because the area has too much going for it to leave over something nobody can switch off. There is a difference, though, between hearing a plane while you’re out in the garden and hearing one from your bed at six in the morning, and that difference usually comes down to the windows. Here’s what glazing can honestly do about it, and what to look at when you’re choosing.
Why the glass is the weak point
Noise gets into a house through whatever is lightest and thinnest, and in nearly every home that’s the windows. Brick and blockwork are dense enough to stop most airborne sound. A single pane, or a tired double glazed unit sitting in a frame that no longer seals, does very little.
Aircraft are a harder problem than most because so much of what reaches you is low frequency rumble. Deep sound travels further and pushes through barriers more easily than higher pitched noise, which is why an airplane overhead is something you feel as well as hear. Two panes of glass on their own won’t deal with that.
The three things that make glazing quieter
Most acoustic performance comes down to a small number of principles, and knowing them makes the conversation with any installer far more useful.
Mass is the first. Thicker, heavier glass is harder for sound energy to shift, so less of it makes it into the room.
Separation is the second. The cavity between panes acts as a buffer, and the way the unit is sealed into the frame decides how much noise slips around the edges instead of passing through the middle. This is why the quality of the fitting counts as much as the specification of the glass. A well sealed frame closes off the flanking routes that let sound bypass perfectly good glazing.
Asymmetry is the third, and it’s the one almost nobody has heard of. When both panes in a unit are the same thickness they resonate at the same frequency, and certain sounds pass through them rather efficiently as a result. Pairing panes of different thicknesses means each blocks what the other lets through, which pays off particularly well against the broad rumble of aircraft.
More panes is not the same as more quiet
There’s a widespread assumption that the answer to noise is simply to add another layer of glass. It’s an understandable idea but it isn’t reliably true. Sound behaves differently to heat, and a unit built primarily to hold warmth in doesn’t automatically hold noise out.
What tends to make the real difference against aircraft is how the two panes in a double glazed unit are specified. Give the outer pane more mass than the inner one, keep a sensible cavity between them, and seal the whole thing properly into a frame that shuts tightly, and the result will outperform plenty of thicker looking alternatives. It’s worth asking any installer what glass thicknesses they’re proposing and why, because that answer tells you far more about the likely result than the number of panes does.
Which specification suits your house depends on where the noise comes from, how the rooms are arranged and which of them you actually want quiet. That’s usually a conversation about the bedrooms and the living rooms on the noisy elevation rather than the whole house at once.
The frame does more work than people expect
Glass gets the attention and the frame quietly decides whether that glass can do its job. Modern uPVC, aluminium and timber frames all close far more tightly than anything fitted thirty years ago, with multi chambered profiles and compression seals that shut out draughts along with the noise that comes in alongside them.
Every window we fit is made to measure for the opening it goes into, and fitted by our own team, which is how the sealing gets the attention it needs rather than being rushed at the end of a long day.
One practical point worth knowing. If you’re doing a noisy elevation, do the whole elevation rather than one window at a time. Sound finds the weakest opening available to it, and a single old window in a wall of new ones will let in a surprising share of what you were trying to keep out.
A quieter house is a realistic aim
No window will make a home under a flight path completely silent. What good glazing does is push aircraft noise into the background, so it stops interrupting conversations, television and sleep. For most households that’s the change that actually matters.
Imperial Windows has been fitting double glazing across Woking, Guildford and the surrounding area since 1977, with A and A+ rated windows in uPVC, aluminium and timber.
If aircraft noise is wearing you down, contact Imperial Windows for a free quote.
