Neighbours children driving me mad!

[woody]

3.  Good drivers will ignore the limits if they are unrealistic.

Nonsense. Good and bad drivers do not know why a certain limit is where it is. Good drivers keep to the limit for exactly this reason and can try to change a limit if they feel it is unrealistic. Bad drivers don't give a shit one way or another and should have their cars impounded, their licenses revoked and issued a bus pass.

[paulca]

Nonsense. Good and bad drivers do not know why a certain limit is where it is. Good drivers keep to the limit for exactly this reason and can try to change a limit if they feel it is unrealistic. Bad drivers don't give a shit one way or another and should have their cars impounded, their licenses revoked and issued a bus pass.

A good driver will have a very good idea why a limit is or isn't in a certain place.  Sometimes it's fairly obvious to the educated driver.

[tszaboo]

3.  Good drivers will ignore the limits if they are unrealistic.

Nonsense. Good and bad drivers do not know why a certain limit is where it is. Good drivers keep to the limit for exactly this reason and can try to change a limit if they feel it is unrealistic. Bad drivers don't give a shit one way or another and should have their cars impounded, their licenses revoked and issued a bus pass.

Oh really? They look like arbitrary numbers to me. Like here, they never place a sign, which starts with an even number. Always 10-30-50-70. God knows why. Probably because that how they are marked on the speedometer (IDK, I have a digital number on it), and the 1 bit user has hard time setting it between two lines. On my commute way, in the last 2 years, 5 sign was changed. I mean reduced. Yesterday, the road was fine till 70, today it isn't. Nothing else changed.

The best reasons to reduce the speed limit is usually "but there are too many cars here".
Yes, because give me an alternative. No? OK, then I take the car. And because you reduced the speed limit, I will spend MORE time there. Now there will be even MORE cars, because of that. And some of them will be speeding. Good reason to reduce the speed limit.

[Cerebus]

Since this is an electronics forum, we need to solve this problem electronically.  The only thing I can think of is putting sensors on the ceiling and come up with a solution using them.

Here in the UK, if a noise complaint gets to the point where you ask someone official to step in (local council noise abatement officers in the case of the UK) one of the bits of evidence that is very helpful to have is a diary noting when excessive noise was made. Using electronics one could go a step further and automate that recording. You could even go as far as recording sound level measurements, but the latter would need some calibration to be have useful evidential value.

[Cerebus]

A tiny lady opens the door, she is maybe 45 kg.

My experience is that the ability to make noise by thumping around on floors is inversely proportional to weight. I am over 80kg, I make no noise walking around the place. My other half is around 52kg, she can be a bit noisy. The cat is under 4kg, she makes the most noise underfoot.

I used to work with a lass called Hazel who was so slight that I could have tucked her under one arm and walked around with her without effort. We worked on the 6th floor of a concrete office block with solid floors. Rupert, who was over 125kg walked around without a whisper or a tremor; when Hazel walked up to your desk you could feel the floor vibrating through your chair.

[Ampera]

Lol, cats can be really noisy on upper stories. It's nuts.

[Cerebus]

On my commute way, in the last 2 years, 5 sign was changed. I mean reduced. Yesterday, the road was fine till 70, today it isn't. Nothing else changed.

Probably the same as here, where if the reported accident rate on a stretch of road exceeds a certain number per mile per year then the speed limit is automatically reduced. However, if the accident rate falls there's never an automatic increase of speed limits which would be the logical thing if this was actually a proper control system with feedback.

[woody]

A good driver will have a very good idea why a limit is or isn't in a certain place.  Sometimes it's fairly obvious to the educated driver.

And sometimes it is not. I live on (at, in?) a street in a small village. The road does not invite to speed; it is maybe 6-7m wide, it is made of pavement (not asphalt), cars are parked, there's a pedestrian crossing halfway. There's also a lot of bicycle traffic day and night (we're in Holland after all).

There is no posted limit so you can legitimately do 50k. Any educated driver understands that in streets like this around 30k would be a sensible speed. A large number of people every day go over 50. Some go way over.

Educated drivers? They do not exist. People change from normal thinking human beings to cavemen (and women) when put behind the wheel of a car.

Back to electronics: I can't wait for autonomous vehicles. Take the monkey out of the equation will benefit us all 

[drummerdimitri]

Guys there seems to be a misunderstanding that I am still living in Germany.

Apologies for that, I just moved back to my home country (Lebanon).

Will talk to the neighbours when I see them, till then I have  chosen to soundproof my ceiling.

It's a cemented ceiling and I was told by a local soundproofing co (fantoni) that what I need to do is create a false ceiling 30cm or so below the current one hung by steel strands and stuff the gap with very dense sound deadening material.

They said that a sound proofing perforated panel is an option instead of gypsum board but that stuff work better for isolating the sound within a room and not as effective at blocking incoming sounds and vibrations from the neighbours.

Should cost me around 3k $ for a 25 square meter room which I think is quite expensive but that includes the price of the perforated acoustic panels (not the dry wall option).

[ez24]

Time for all the previous electronic and non-electronic non-starters to bow down before my electronic technically feasible solution which will actually work with around 100$ of alibaba/ebay junk, or even stuff the OP may already have on hand.

Ok, since we know that noise cancellation will almost be impossible, I have the one solution you can do, though a little dirty, but, completely FAIR if done right.

Place a microphone mounted to the ceiling where the kids make their noise.  Attach it to an around 100 watt class D amplifier board + sub woofer mounter on the ceiling of where their parents are sleeping.  Now, any time the kids make noise, their parents hear it waking them up.

If the neighbors complain, tell them is a new physical mounted ceiling hardware, say a fancy long lamp or ceiling fan or something or other, which appears to pass noise from one floor's room to another as it reverberates vibrations from adjacent rooms.  Tell them the noise they hear is from their kids.

The trick here is to get the volume on the amp just right and you can now never turn it off of they might begin to question whats going on.  If you want to get sneaky about it, just start with a low volume and every other day things get noisy above you, inch up the volume slightly until the day the kids begin to be shut up by the parents just thinking their kids are getting particularly loud.  Then lock in that volume level and they will never know what you have done.

This gets my vote for the best solution.  If this topic gets shut down - maybe someone can start a new one that is more focused on unique electronic solutions for this problem.  I am sure that there are others with the same problem.

I am going to change the title - never did this before but someone did it to me.  Don't know what is going to happen.  Just trying to get this focused on electronics.

[Naguissa]

Since this is an electronics forum, we need to solve this problem electronically.  The only thing I can think of is putting sensors on the ceiling and come up with a solution using them.

Time for all the previous electronic and non-electronic non-starters to bow down before my electronic technically feasible solution which will actually work with around 100$ of alibaba/ebay junk, or even stuff the OP may already have on hand.

Ok, since we know that noise cancellation will almost be impossible, I have the one solution you can do, though a little dirty, but, completely FAIR if done right.

Place a microphone mounted to the ceiling where the kids make their noise.  Attach it to an around 100 watt class D amplifier board + sub woofer mounter on the ceiling of where their parents are sleeping.  Now, any time the kids make noise, their parents hear it waking them up.

If the neighbors complain, tell them is a new physical mounted ceiling hardware, say a fancy long lamp or ceiling fan or something or other, which appears to pass noise from one floor's room to another as it reverberates vibrations from adjacent rooms.  Tell them the noise they hear is from their kids.

The trick here is to get the volume on the amp just right and you can now never turn it off of they might begin to question whats going on.  If you want to get sneaky about it, just start with a low volume and every other day things get noisy above you, inch up the volume slightly until the day the kids begin to be shut up by the parents just thinking their kids are getting particularly loud.  Then lock in that volume level and they will never know what you have done.

If talking doesn't work, this is the BEST answer I've read any time. Simply brilliant.

Enviado desde mi Jolla mediante Tapatalk

[bd139]

I think squirting liquid ass through their letterbox once a week is quicker and cheaper

[Mr. Scram]

Time for all the previous electronic and non-electronic non-starters to bow down before my electronic technically feasible solution which will actually work with around 100$ of alibaba/ebay junk, or even stuff the OP may already have on hand.

Ok, since we know that noise cancellation will almost be impossible, I have the one solution you can do, though a little dirty, but, completely FAIR if done right.

Place a microphone mounted to the ceiling where the kids make their noise.  Attach it to an around 100 watt class D amplifier board + sub woofer mounter on the ceiling of where their parents are sleeping.  Now, any time the kids make noise, their parents hear it waking them up.

If the neighbors complain, tell them is a new physical mounted ceiling hardware, say a fancy long lamp or ceiling fan or something or other, which appears to pass noise from one floor's room to another as it reverberates vibrations from adjacent rooms.  Tell them the noise they hear is from their kids.

The trick here is to get the volume on the amp just right and you can now never turn it off of they might begin to question whats going on.  If you want to get sneaky about it, just start with a low volume and every other day things get noisy above you, inch up the volume slightly until the day the kids begin to be shut up by the parents just thinking their kids are getting particularly loud.  Then lock in that volume level and they will never know what you have done.

While this may be very satisfying in the short run, it's a perfect recipe to dig yourself into a hole you'll never get out again without moving. You certainly won't be the first to get stuck in a war with his neighbours, both making each other's lives unbearable while not solving anything. While there always will be unreasonable people, simply talking to someone is always your best bet. You can always escalate things, but de-escalation isn't so easy.

That begs the question, has OP talked to his neighbours by now?

[Simon]

This is such a passive and subservient attitude it makes my eyes water.

Who makes laws?  The government.  The government (are supposed to) serve the people and the people's interests.  Thus by proxy, people make the laws.  As you are indeed a person (though you don't seem to want to stand up for yourself) YOU are or can be involved in making the laws.

What a simplistic view, sadly in a deteriorating society and one full of selfish dickheads this does not work. If you gave equal say to the thugs you will soon find all sorts of things to be legal. Ever heard about the buy (in the UK) that complained about kids damaging his hanging baskets and ending up being mobbed and beaten to death? If someone plays music so loud that it is clear they know they are disturbing everyone do you think they can be reasoned with ? having already demonstrated how unreasonable they are. Sadly parents are most often totally oblivious to their children's behaviour. My brother in laws brother has managed to put an end to Christmas's together because his little brat is an angel in his eyes so all of my side of the family now bugger off on holiday instead of have to deal with his oblivion and his child/dren

As you live in the UK you should know how hopeless the police are. there is 1 officer on duty on average for my town at any time, the only way they can deal with anything is to prioritise and pull in offices from neighbouring areas and strangely 5 turn up for a small thing and no one wants to know if it's more serious.

Noise issues that come from within properties are not even dealt with by the police, that is down to the council that expect you to expose your identity to the offender before the offence is even acknowledged so they discourage enforcement and won't come out at 11pm to witness it.

Standing up for oneself as you put it can mean you either end up a further victim or on the wrong side of the law.

[bd139]

Couldn’t agree more. The only way to deal with cunts, as they are colloquially known as, is to be as unreasaonable as they are. For example I live at the end of a block of houses. The border of my property is a dead end. If some pikey twunt trespasses, instead of going back, they kick the fence down. To solve this I put industrial grade fencing up. So they climbed over it and broke it.

So I put carpet tack strips all over the top which went nice and rusty. Cue torn shell suit, blood stains and tetanus. Win 

The smartphone is a great invention. Pull that fucker out and record someone being a cunt. If they hit you the police will be all over it like a seagull on chips because it’s easy. If they don’t then they back off. Had some crazy bitch reverse into me outside the school a couple of years back and blame me “bumpers are for bumping”  . So I recorded her losing her shit and calling me all the names under the sun loudly to detract from my calling her out on it. Emailed it to the local police station (email is a win), got a call back and she got a caution and I got a crime number and handed it all over to the insurance company.

[Simon]

That is essentially why i have a dash cam, I do their jobs for them and I get dealt with.

[bd139]

Yes dash cam was a good investment here too. Just pointing at it is enough to avoid a lot of situations.

[BrianHG]

Time for all the previous electronic and non-electronic non-starters to bow down before my electronic technically feasible solution which will actually work with around 100$ of alibaba/ebay junk, or even stuff the OP may already have on hand.

Ok, since we know that noise cancellation will almost be impossible, I have the one solution you can do, though a little dirty, but, completely FAIR if done right.

Place a microphone mounted to the ceiling where the kids make their noise.  Attach it to an around 100 watt class D amplifier board + sub woofer mounter on the ceiling of where their parents are sleeping.  Now, any time the kids make noise, their parents hear it waking them up.

If the neighbors complain, tell them is a new physical mounted ceiling hardware, say a fancy long lamp or ceiling fan or something or other, which appears to pass noise from one floor's room to another as it reverberates vibrations from adjacent rooms.  Tell them the noise they hear is from their kids.

The trick here is to get the volume on the amp just right and you can now never turn it off of they might begin to question whats going on.  If you want to get sneaky about it, just start with a low volume and every other day things get noisy above you, inch up the volume slightly until the day the kids begin to be shut up by the parents just thinking their kids are getting particularly loud.  Then lock in that volume level and they will never know what you have done.

While this may be very satisfying in the short run, it's a perfect recipe to dig yourself into a hole you'll never get out again without moving. You certainly won't be the first to get stuck in a war with his neighbours, both making each other's lives unbearable while not solving anything. While there always will be unreasonable people, simply talking to someone is always your best bet. You can always escalate things, but de-escalation isn't so easy.

That begs the question, has OP talked to his neighbours by now?

Never get out of again, forever?  Kids grow up...  Your having their parents train them to be quieter in the morning using my system.  Either that, or once they are old enough, the parents will send them out if they are too noisy in the morning.

[Mr. Scram]

Never get out of again, forever?  Kids grow up...  Your having their parents train them to be quieter in the morning using my system.  Either that, or once they are old enough, the parents will send them out if they are too noisy in the morning.

When you start a fight it's not about the kids any more. There's plenty of neighbours who fight simply because they started fighting one day and never stopped, with the root cause having become fully irrelevant or forgotten. Neighbours can make your life hell. You can make theirs hell too, but that doesn't make your life any better. Souring a relationship is easy, making it work is hard, and living next to someone means having to deal with them.

You don't have to just accept what they throw you, but it pays to be diplomatic. Even being right isn't wholly relevant.

[Simon]

Yes dash cam was a good investment here too. Just pointing at it is enough to avoid a lot of situations.

As i did with one road rager, he was so scared be broke the speed limit despite thinking he was on camera to get away from me.

[BrianHG]

Never get out of again, forever?  Kids grow up...  Your having their parents train them to be quieter in the morning using my system.  Either that, or once they are old enough, the parents will send them out if they are too noisy in the morning.

When you start a fight it's not about the kids any more. There's plenty of neighbours who fight simply because they started fighting one day and never stopped, with the root cause having become fully irrelevant or forgotten. Neighbours can make your life hell. You can make theirs hell too, but that doesn't make your life any better. Souring a relationship is easy, making it work is hard, and living next to someone means having to deal with them.

You don't have to just accept what they throw you, but it pays to be diplomatic. Even being right isn't wholly relevant.

Perhaps you didn't understand my hardware's method.  The goal is to make the parents hear equally what you hear from being beneath the children's room, recognize that their children are actually jumping around.  My device doesn't randomly make noise in the parents room, or make the children's noise louder.  It makes it identical or even slightly less to what you hear living below, for real, in real time, the actual sound.  Why should they get to live in relative silence being on the upper level while you get the pounding from your ceiling.

You don't go through the price and hassle of buying $$$ and setting up and tuning my apparatus if you haven't already tried the free approach of asking multiple times friendly and not getting results.  Why should you have to be the one to move if they wont quiet down.

[BrianHG]

Note that at my old semi-detached house, it only took 1 solid verbal agreement, between 10am and 11pm, anything goes music wise.  Unless there was a special request for any special reason to go outside of those hours, or, to be quiet throughout the day.  The agreement held for around 6 years without issue.

[Mr. Scram]

Perhaps you didn't understand my hardware's method.  The goal is to make the parents hear equally what you hear from being beneath the children's room, recognize that their children are actually jumping around.  My device doesn't randomly make noise in the parents room, or make the children's noise louder.  It makes it identical to what you hear living below, for real.

I completely understand what you're trying to do, but that approach is way too analytical. You need to recognize that these people aren't looking at things from a neutral perspective. They're just trying to live their lives and you're making it more complicated. You're also creating unneccesary noise, while their kids are just being kids. "You can't exactly expect children to be dead quiet, now can you?" would be a response that isn't even that unreasonable.

Doing to them what they do to you is mathmatically sound, but this isn't an equation that needs to be solved. You need empathy on both sides to get anywhere. Being what's undoubtedly perceived as a smartass isn't going to foster it. Again, being right isn't going to help you if things go sour because of it.

[Simon]

This is all why I made sure I bought a house and not a flat and preferred an end of terrace to a middle one. only one neighbour to listen to and they are fairly reasonable, even the one next to them that played music so load you can hear it "through" the neighbours have managed to grow out of it. complaining would be pointless as they know what they are doing and I'd like to keep my car in more or less one piece.

Currently paying my mortgage off as fast as I can so that I can move out, rent the place and use that rent to pay for something nicer.

[Mr. Scram]

Note that at my old semi-detached house, it only took 1 solid verbal agreement, between 10am and 11pm, anything goes music wise.  Unless there was a special request for any special reason to go outside of those hours, or, to be quiet throughout the day.  The agreement held for around 6 years without issue.

That would be an example of an excellent way to handle things. Talk to each other, give each other some leeway and agree upon what's reasonable. You both concede hearing from the neighbours is inevitable, yet also limit the nuisance.

I've made a point of talking to any new neighbours moving in, giving them my number so they can call me whenever they experience trouble. I've found that this greatly reduces the annoyance caused by any noise you make, and they're more likely to talk to you before things get really tense. I think research even confirms that this works. The idea of being able to do something about the things that stresses you reduces the total stress experienced. The idea you can't control the thing that stresses you increases stress. Without changing your own behaviour one bit, you can still impact the stress perceived by the neighbours.