Silencing a loud air compressor

[wisp]

I need some help, my air compressor is driving me crazy, its a 5hp Husky upright. Here is a link to it on the Husky page

Does anyone have any idea how to quiet it down? Larger muffler, mabye enclose it, I cant move it outside though. At this point I have to do something, between it and the air mister, I can't hear any tool cutting sounds while its running. Here is a link to a 2.5mb video of some aluminum being cut with a 3/8" EM so you can hear just how noisy it is. Be sure to turn your speakers WAY up for the full effect.

You will need the free DivX Player to watch the clip.

I think my right ear may be bleeding....

[JPMach]

I have a 7hp four cylinder comp that was annoying me. I pit mine in a corner and then bought some noise absorbing foam from MSC with sticky back and stuck to the two walls bahind it. Also built a small frame screwed into the corner to hold two sheets of extruded foam on the other two sides. It helped quite abit but it could be better.
The neatest thing I saw at one company was they had built a little room for their comps with concrete blocks and filled the holes in the blocks with sand to absorb sound. You could actually here yourself think in that place. Plus they had storage up on top of it then.I think they had pipes run outside to for the inlet and blowoff lines.

JP

[DanOSB]

some people wrap it around with carpet.. (not from firsthand expereience and they said it helped a bit..

or you could build a small room for it.. and have a hole to outside or something and seal it up with styrofoam or something that way it will prevent sound.. a bit.. concrete blocks with sand sounds good but $$ and big job too..

[unterhaus]

I hate compressor noise. Ten years in a bike shop with an ancient compressor will do that to you.

I always wanted to build a noise cancelling setup for mine. Put it in a box with a big speaker, a big power amp driven by a microphone through a delay. Since the compressor runs at the same speed, it should be possible to set the delay so the previous compressor thump is cancelled by the speaker.

[ViperTX]

Build a room around it or move it outside to some enclosure.

[championp]

The last shop I worked at built a closet out of 2x4's and 1/2" plywood, with eggcrate foam on the inside. there was about 12" clearance around the entire compressor and a 8" ventilation fan going out the top. The top was about 18-24" over the highest part of the compressor. This totally did the trick. You could still tell when it kicked on but it was very muffled. Like maybe a car engind idling outside the shop. Also, the better you anchor it to the floor the less resonance you will get.

I am going to try it at my new shop in the next few weeks and I will post if I got it right or not.

[ViperTX]

unterhaus....nope don't work that way......noise cancellation works only at the location where the noise is being heard.....like where you are standing...so that would be where you direct the out of phase noise.....also note that noise cancellation works best on noise that is continuous....

[MrWild]

A lot of compressor noise comes from the inlets. As each pulse is drawn in a reed valve rattles and vibrates as the inrushing air moves it. For a low effort fix that may work good enough, you might try to fit a muffler to the intake or a make up a prefilter chamber. I recently bought a Puma V-twin air compressor about the same size as your Husky. It is much quieter out of the box than the half horse compressor it has replaced. It also has nice enclosed intake filters.

[wisp]

A lot of noise does come from the air inlet/filter/muffler. If I lay a red shop rag over the inlet hole in the muffler, it gets considerably quieter. I wonder if you could connect a hose to the inlet hole, and run the hose outside, would it get the noise level down some....

Has anyone ever seen a hose or other type of remote air intake on a compressor? I think mabye a remote air intake combined with an enclosure made with some type of noise resistant panels might do the trick. My only worry is heat build up inside the enclosure, but how could you vent the enclosure without letting a ton of noise escape?

[ger21]

Come listen to the 50HP compressor in our shop and you'll think yours is quiet.
http://www.gardnerdenver.com/GDCorpP...ute=to&id=1079

[Caprirs]

For what it's worth, the less expensive compressors from Sears, Home Depot, Harbor Freight, etc. are louder because the pumps turn at higher speeds. The industrial units typically cost more because they use a bigger pump turning fewer revolutions.

Best solution is to build a box/room/closet around it but be careful that you don't bake the poor thing in it's own heat.

[whateg01]

For what it's worth, the less expensive compressors from Sears, Home Depot, Harbor Freight, etc. are louder because the pumps turn at higher speeds. The industrial units typically cost more because they use a bigger pump turning fewer revolutions.

Best solution is to build a box/room/closet around it but be careful that you don't bake the poor thing in it's own heat.

I don't know which has more of an effect, the higher speed or the fact that these less expensive "oil-less" compressors do not use oil as lubrication. Instead they use a teflon coating on the piston or the cylinder wall. I would think that the higher speed combined with the lack of damping that oil would provide probably conspire to make much more noise.

I previously had a small Makita Makair compressor with twin tanks mounted one-above-the-other next to the pump/motor assembly. That thing was loud, no matter what was done. When I purchased a Husky 60 gal compressor from Home Depot, I was amazed at the side-by-side noise comparison.

Just my 2.5 cents.

Dave