Greetings, folks. I've volunteered myself again.
I'm helping a local church deal with a noisy meeting hall. The space has so many reflective surfaces, it's almost impossible to carry on a conversation in there even if you only have two dozen people present. When you fill it to capacity (200 or so), it's downright painful.
They have a modest budget ($3000-5000), which should be enough to do the job, but probably isn't enough to pay for an acoustics consultant from Chicago or St Louis to travel here and come up with a plan (there's no one local).
I figure they just need some rigid fiberglass panels, wrapped in fireproof fabric, on the ceiling. But I could use help figuring out exactly how much of the ceiling to cover, what materials to use, and how to attach the panels.
Here are some photos:
http://www.worksongs.net/photos/2008-03-UU/And some basics about the room:
-- The room is 50 feet by 40 feet, with 12 foot ceilings.
-- The floor is hard, shiny, linoleum. For maintenance reasons, they don't want to carpet the floor, although I'm sure that would help the noise problems.
-- They'd like to maintain the aesthetics as much as possible...
-- The ceiling is painted hardwood. It's a beautiful old space, with the big beams and the woodwork... but there are no absorptive surfaces whatsoever.
-- One side of the room is bay windows, the other is open to a hallway... on the other two sides about a third of the wall surface is doorways, and the other 2/3 is plaster walls, bulletin boards, etc. It would be hard to find a place for sound treatment on the walls...
-- The ceiling is divided into six or seven bays by big exposed beams. In each bay there are two hanging pendant lights, with surface mounted electric wiring (in conduit.)
-- Big ventilation ducts run along the long sides of the room, at the ceiling level.
Some questions...
1) Do you agree that adding some fiberglass panels on the ceiling is the most cost-effective solution? They are also considering acoustic tiling.. but the surface mounted wiring makes that tricky... they'd have to put in drop ceiling which would look awful. They were also considering acoustic paints, but I figure those would be of marginal effectiveness.
2) How much of the ceiling surface area should be covered? I don't want to deaden the room too much, but I figure it would still be a lively room even if they covered the whole ceiling, what with the floor being so reflective.
3) Is it okay to mount DIY fabric wrapped rigid fiberglass panels on a ceiling? I don't want to have fiberglass fibers or dust fall out... I've only used that kind of panel on walls where it seems to be fine. Would it be better to use rockwool or another non-fiberglass product? Or an encapsulated commercial product designed for ceiling use?
4) If panels are the thing.. how would you go about making them and mounting them on the ceiling? Or is there a commercial product you would recommend?
Thanks for the help!
-Garret