I need your help! I own a house near a state road (trucks, buses are allowed) near Philadelphia. With the bad snow years the past few years, our road condition deteriorated but not so badly (little bumps), but badly enough to shake/vibrate my home when big trucks/buses go by (about 45 miles per hour). I'm trying to find a way to perhaps dig the backyard about 6ft (1-2ft wide), and pour in concrete or something that can dampen the vibration (person from Lowe's said this). Is there anything I can do? FYI: distance to my home from the street is about 100 – 150ft (our backyard). I'm willing to spend the money as long as I can eliminate this vibration coming from the state road through the ground.
Things I have done already:
- I spoke to the local police station if they can lower the speed limit. They said "No."
- I put 2 tons of rocks against the fence (to the state road) to push down the ground to dampen the vibration coming from the traffic through the ground. It didn't do much (slight improvement).
Your advice will be appreciated! FYI: My home is shown here in blue dot next to the state road (Lancaster Ave).
I posted this to one person, but thought it can benefit more folks.
What I did (digging 6ft x 90ft inground trench, and pouring sand to fill it) didn't work. I ended up wasting $15K…My home still shakes, and I'm out of ideas… If it worked, I was going to put up some photos of all the work, but what a bummer (so if you are having a similar issue – don't dig!). I followed the research work by someone in Canada who I liked the idea of, but oh well. Asked the township to resurface the road and stuff. They'll do it over this summer, and I'm hoping that can do the trick. Below is the picture right before sand was poured in.
Best Answer
since its very difficult to decouple a home from its surrounding substrates, and sound propagation would otherwise just continue, you probably wont be able to do it unless you lift the house and isolate it from the earth. berms, walls, and other physical barriers would have to be carefully designed, and probably be massively heavy to have any effect - all costly and invasive.
however, you have another option but it might be expensive. you can have a sound engineer design an active acoustical damper for your home. basically it uses large subwoofers to blast sound waves through your foundation (or at least at your foundation from the interior of the home). the subs are triggered by sensors on the foundation walls and out in the yard and are all controlled by a computer. essentially when a vibration comes in, it blasts the opposite waveform and cancels it out. the issue is going to be finding someone to do it. i was part of a job fifteen years ago that had something like this designed and installed for a site for a large optical telescope, and it worked amazingly well. but i have no idea where you would start to look for the right guys to do it. maybe your local college physics or engineering department?