I dread this time of year having to listen to the leaf blowers. I was wondering, if you lived in the country how many acres would you need to have surround your home so you couldn’t hear the neighbors leaf blowers, lawn mowers or any other noise?
I know with sound that higher frequency sounds (such as bird chirping) don’t travel as far, but lower frequency sounds do such as a truck idling. In the absence of some formula for acoustics, how many acres do people have where they feel makes it quiet?
If your neighbors have big lots too, they’ll probably be shooting their rifles in the backyard. So you might need to be 4 or more *miles *from them to be unable to hear anything over the silence of otherwise uninhabited land.
So you’d need a parcel 8 by 8 miles with your house dead center to ensure you’re away from neighbor noise. That’s 64 square miles, or not quite 41,000 acres.
To be sure, hilly forested terrain will muffle noise better than wide open flat desert. So you might get away with just 10,000 acres in terrain like that.
Depends on the neighbors. The people on either side of me are/were so quiet that I don’t know that I’ve heard either doing anything for several years. One side I have say 6-8 feet and the other side say 65 feet. Back when I lived in the country we were 700 yards from the property line with one neighbor and a fair bit more than that on the other. At least weekly would would notice some sort of noise (usually gun shots or equipment) from one of the other.
I like to be close enough to hear gun shots.
String a few neighbors together and the chance of burglary & robbery go down in our ( me & the neighbors ) opinion.
I live probably 5 miles from a regional airport and I can hear planes (jet engines) taking off or landing in the mornings. It seems that sound travels further in the morning because I don’t hear them the rest of the day. Wonder if there’s any scientific truth to that or am I just tuning it out the rest of the time?
Only a couple acres are needed for privacy. Normal neighbor activities like raised voices, music, and moving around won’t be heard. Even minor construction work will be muffled.
But any extreme noises like lawn mowers, blowers and wood chippers carry for very long distances. There’s no escaping them.
Our ranch is a little bigger, about 44,000 acres and I can attest that in the center you don’t hear much at all from neighbors, even during hunting season, although the train several miles away and the occasional plane at 35,000 feet overhead are heard periodically if the wind is right. How do I know? I searched it out specifically for this reason, find the place where you get away from all that. That’s where I’ll put the retirement [del]house[/del] cabin. In our case it’s little vegetation and gently rolling hills. Your spread may differ.
I have about 14 acres, in a long, skinny lot. My nearest neighbors are about 1500’ away. I don’t hear their music, their kids playing, etc. I do hear their livestock guardian dogs barking, which sets off my dogs. When they mow their driveway I hear their mower. When the sheep are up near the front I hear their sheep. Other than that, I hear gunshots from hunters and target shooters; I had one neighbor 1/2 mile away who had a race car that he tinkered with and sometimes I’d hear the engine. Other neighbor has a rooster I sometimes hear. Still, it’s quiet enough that I can hear a car 3/4 mile up the road coming near. I can hear fox, coyotes and crows. It’s pretty quiet.
If you’re out in the country, you’re not only farther from your neighbors, there are also fewer of them. So the cumulative noise is far less.
Your real problem is smells. My Mother bought a five acre plot a couple of decades ago, and put her house smack in the middle of it. Within two years a neighbor had built a horse barn right on the fence line, even with her front door. The stench in August was unbearable.
And she really thought that was bad until a Taco Bell opened about six miles down the road. Fast food grease and cooking smells, combined with Taco Bell dumpster, and then filtered through the horse barn and composting stall muck? She literally lost weight because of it.
She decided you just can’t win, sold the house and moved into a townhouse. Her reasoning: “In the city you are not the only one complaining, so these things get addressed quickly.”
Sometimes you can actually tell shots fired in anger or kinda know by where they are coming from, rate & volume, two different weapons, etc.
But::::::
I was noting the reactions of a car full of young hoodlums that speed up and are not seen again when when a lot of different places have shooting going on all different times day & night.
When seen, the word goes around and random shooting increases a bit. Areas get a reputation in the criminal world for how easy/hard a it is/would be to mess around in.
And maybe it helps not at all but the shooting is fun and noting that neighbor A is sighting in his .75 caliber black powder and neighbor B is firing his 30-30 is interesting.
YMMV
Oh, and the local police practice range is about a ½ mile away.
It is virtually impossible to get away from all noise but there is a comfort level as described by other posters. I grew up on a 250 acre farm and we could hear neighbors dogs and tractors etc. Nevertheless it was peaceful.
We have a home on 4 acres in a busy tourist location. The house (by chance not design) is built in a hollow and I have built up earth mounds along the road boundary. Sound rises with the result that ambient noise travels above the house and garden. At night it is quiet enough to hear the small river 500 yards away.
We still hear the neighbours dogs and children occasionally but its not intrusive. They in turn can hear my chainsaw.
