Reducing vibration coming from the floor while at sleep

Question

having an interesting issue here. Imagine you live above some mental dude who starts a vibrating device and frames it against its ceiling - my floor (for your imagination, see example of this at the bottom), or just plays a sound speaker on low frequency. Vibration in my apartment barely feels when siting on a chair, however it does feel quite a bit when I am in bed - it either stops me fall as sleep, or wakes up. This is my nightmare for the last couple months.

Had all kind of tries (f.ex. truck tires under bed ^^), but nothing helped, apart of a temporarily solution - sleep in a different place every night (meaning - no bed, only mattress on a floor).

Need a real solution. My tired head brings one idea - a hanging bed (seriously). Some frame stands on a floor and on that frame my bed hangs. Yes that means I sleep kinda in a ship, but waving effect could be smaller if bed hangs on V shaped ropes (not vertical). See my art drawing example bellow (red is rope, blue is frame, black is bed).

My issue now is - would this even work? Any better ideas? If not, maybe an advice on what materials could be used? I live in Europe - so don't suggest bamboo sticks etc. Willing to find reliable and cheap materials (since I wont be living like this forever :)

If you don't like the idea of a "bad neighbour" problem here, imagine I live close to rails and same issue happens - vibration when train goes by.

Help guys, this is a real issue.

p.s. estimated total weight I would say 300kg. (no other person in bed except me, obviously...)

p.p.s. found an interesting idea from @broccoli here. Though a bit in doubt that that small vibration would cause bed to move instead of shake. If anyone could elaborate on this, would be great too.

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Edit:

Answer from @Fred sounds reasonable, but adding an image of the tire chamber. Tried to put these 4 under the bed, but vibration reduction was too small. Also had vibration pads under the tire chambers.

Thats why hanging bed looks as a 'best' option for me :)

Answer 1

Apart from the other two valid options (rubber pads and anti-vibration mounts) another (maybe less expensive) option would be to increase the mass which is attached on the bed.

effectively you would be creating option (c) in the above diagram.

Increasing the mass, (in a simplified model) would decrease the eigenfrequency $\omega_n$. Therefore, (assuming the excitation frequency $\omega$ is of a single frequency) the ratio of excitation frequency $\frac{\omega}{\omega_n}$ would be increased.

Increasing the ratio of frequencies will lead you in a region of the transmissability ratio that has a lower value ($r$ needs to be lower than $\sqrt{2}$) to have damping of vibrations) - probably now the floor/bed/mattress system is below that.

So attaching some weight on the bed (in order to see some noticeable difference you would need to approximately double the mass that is attached to the bed, which in your case might be an issue). However, its much less expensive to start experimenting with this before buying anti-vibration mounts or elastic pads.

My strategy would be:

• attach some weight and sleep a couple of night and see if there is an improvement (or worsening)
• if it works (by increasing the weight), but its not enough, I would then opt for putting elastic pads (the softer the better)
• the final step would be to try the anti-vibration mounts (which can be expensive). However, before I did that I would try to analyse the vibrations and find out the offending excitations.

Answer 2

I would try the cheapest way first - sleep on the stacked up mattresses without frame, nor box spring, to increase the effect of damping. A thick wall to wall carpet underneath will provide extra help to block out the noise.

Answer 3

It's difficult to say what will work in your situation. I think some trial and error might be involved.

Constructing a frame and hanging the bed as you suggest could work but I would vibration dampers under each leg of the frame and if possible in each of the hanging ropes. It seems a lot of work though.

It might be easier to put some vibration dampers under each leg of the bed. Which vibration damper to use is where the trial and error applies. Following are some suggestions to try:

Vibration pads or mats or even screwing an anti-vibration mount into the bottom of each leg of the bed.

Spring vibration damper - these come with either two, three or four springs.

Answer 4

I would say it's the entire building, including your ceiling and even the foundation of the building that is vibrating. I have seen even the sidewalk shaking.

Remedies can be very elaborate and costly with just a slight improvement.

I would try something like this floor barrier in combination with earplugs and maybe eye blinds with rubber pads under your bed legs.

floor barrier link.

Answer 5

Here is an antivibration mount which will probably work, and is cheap:

Get you four small inner tubes (as used in wheelbarrows or small garden wagons, hand trucks, etc. and inflate them about half-full of air.

Cut you four squares of plywood to the same size as the inner tubes and place one square atop each of the tubes.

Lift your bedframe up off the floor and position one tube-and-plywood sandwich under each leg of the frame.

This will probably kill off the vibrations before they can get into your bedframe. If not, experiment by adding more air to the tubes, or letting some air out of them.

Please let all of us here know how this works out for you!

Answer 6

A number of years ago I was in a similar situation. As kamran says, the entire building is involved.

Before going further, I would point out that whether or not you are able to ignore it / whether you even care, is in significant part a product of your own stress level, possibly to do with the actual source of the disturbance, possibly unrelated. Current times are of course no help for this.

Work on things in your own life. If you start making progress there you won't care as much. (consider: people sleep through police sirens, freight trains etc all the time, if and only if they instinctively consider it normal and non threatening).

When you have a chance, move out.

Answer 7

TLDR: hammock

The woman below me and my husband purchased the exact same device you pictured to torture us with. It seems she snapped during lockdown as it was much more quiet than usual in our building with no traffic going by - it was a very, very busy thoroughfare in a big city heading to the freeway, but during lockdown suddenly it was completely silent outside and you could hear a pin drop. I guess she could hear those pins dropping over her head and blamed us. So I was laying in bed one day in the middle of the day, depressed, and actually heard her installing the device under our bed. I could hear her screwing it against the ceiling. At first when our entire floor started shaking I thought it must have been fan. But that didn’t make sense because you have to drill holes to install a fan into a ceiling. She has been doing weird things prior to this. She got a high pitched bird deterrent that was heard screaming loudly across the entire neighborhood because she blamed us for the birds that also started hanging around the fire escape now that there weren’t any tourists coming to golden gate park (a block away) they were coming to eat at our flowers.

Long story short, I couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t lay in bed.

My solution was to finally buy a hammock. I was finally able to sleep in the hammock until we were able to move.

Answer 8

I know there was someone who had a few blog posts about a similar issue and ultimately settled on low-cost anti-vibration pads.

Myself, I was theorizing if one could float a bed frame on a thin layer of water or air (like an air table game). Maybe not practical though.