Ack! Under siege by subsonics!
Oct. 9th, 2007 11:59 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexxkayI've been having lots of trouble sleeping lately. I had been attributing it to the tooth issues, and I still think that is partially true. But since it cooled off and I turned off my air conditioner (a major source of white noise), I started noticing an annoying near-subsonic hum in my room. It came and went, but while it was going, it prevented sleep, or caused what sleep I did get to be nightmare-laden.
At first, I suspected late night laundry or dishwasher loads to be the culprit. It had a periodic fade-out, fade-back-in behavior which seemed simiilar to those appliances' duty cycles. Last night, woken by the hum at 2:30 AM, I pestered some wakeful roommates about it. However, long after those loads had completed, the hum remained. I poked around the house, turning off every electronic device I could find. No dice.
My next thought -- could it possibly be one of the fans mounted in the roof, that somehow went amok and turned itself on? Once![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kestrell was awake (so I wouldn't be disturbing *her* sleep), I went about excavating the junk in the front room so I could get access to the eaves. The fan that is near the trap door was quiescent. The 'passage' further into the house was barely large enough to fit me, and didn't actually have flooring, just beams and insulation, so after poking my head in a short ways, I gave up on that approach. My only remaining hope was to try selectively turning off circuit breakers until I found the offending cirduit -- and hope that it was a circuit that wasn't being shared by other, vital systems.
I enlistedkestrell's help in this plan, but she soon short-circuited it by applying her super-blink senses to the hum, and quickly pinpointing its actual source. Sadly, this knowledge makes things worse, not better. It's the heating system, which we can't exactly leave turned off.
I'm now googling for help with this problem. Any advice would be appreciated.
ETA: I have a white noise machine already, it's just ineffective against sounds in this frequency range.
At first, I suspected late night laundry or dishwasher loads to be the culprit. It had a periodic fade-out, fade-back-in behavior which seemed simiilar to those appliances' duty cycles. Last night, woken by the hum at 2:30 AM, I pestered some wakeful roommates about it. However, long after those loads had completed, the hum remained. I poked around the house, turning off every electronic device I could find. No dice.
My next thought -- could it possibly be one of the fans mounted in the roof, that somehow went amok and turned itself on? Once
kestrell was awake (so I wouldn't be disturbing *her* sleep), I went about excavating the junk in the front room so I could get access to the eaves. The fan that is near the trap door was quiescent. The 'passage' further into the house was barely large enough to fit me, and didn't actually have flooring, just beams and insulation, so after poking my head in a short ways, I gave up on that approach. My only remaining hope was to try selectively turning off circuit breakers until I found the offending cirduit -- and hope that it was a circuit that wasn't being shared by other, vital systems.I enlisted
kestrell's help in this plan, but she soon short-circuited it by applying her super-blink senses to the hum, and quickly pinpointing its actual source. Sadly, this knowledge makes things worse, not better. It's the heating system, which we can't exactly leave turned off.I'm now googling for help with this problem. Any advice would be appreciated.
ETA: I have a white noise machine already, it's just ineffective against sounds in this frequency range.