Building my recording studio in a flood/humid area...

thanx for the interest Nightmusic...i'll start a new (construction) thread where i'll put all the detailed info plus pics of the place (and concrete walls) in a few days. The wooden pieces where actually small pieces like 3x3x30cm sticks forgotten in the concrete wall side to side....some of them were complettely rotten leaving an actuall hole in the concrete (i could reach the ground through them)...what i'm doing is removing ALL the woods from the concrete (not just the ones that were rotten) and sealling the holles because as you said all wood eventually will rot and create a path for water to flow in....i hope the polyorethain foam and acrylic elastomer caulk will do the job...i prefered that over cement because the holles are very deep(30 cm) and i don't know if i could pour cement in there properly....anyway what i understood is that when you see water in a space (and not just moisture) there's got to be some serious damage in the concrete walls....unless you are under the surface and water is coming from above :D You mentioned something about allternative "floating floor" sollution.....please let me know....i'm cleaning up my space(and sealing the holes :D ) in order to get things started...

...and another thing...please check this http://www.johnlsayers.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=9092 and let me know if you have any suggestions on that....i 'm not getting any feedback there :cry: It's about glassblocks instead of exterior windows in order to keep daylight in thanks Nikodemos

Well, i don't really know about acrylic elastomer caulk efficiency, i think that should work, but here everything depends on if that caulk is made for water exposed place-as bathrooms,etc..., or not. In that kind of situation, it is always good to use products that are made for a similar situation than yours. For ex, in my situation i want to use what they use for swimming pool waterproofing, as i am pretty sure it will work the way it was primarly made to. I will put that product mixed to the cement, and add a layer of it of 3cm on every side wall.I also know that another recording studio here in France has used the same product, with very good result in the end, for the same pb as you and me-i am talking there about the water infiltration coming thru the cement, due to rain- i am not talking about any flood situation there- Maybe you can use the same principle for your holes? Even if you don't put cement on the 30 cm long, you could mix the solutions between polyurethane foam and cement? I mean beginning filling the holes with polyurethane foam first, and then caulking with that kind of treated cement? I just feel that cement would be more resistant, but i am not certain.Everything depends on the kind of elastomer caulk that you will use. Well...About your floating floor... I can remember that last time i read your thread, your layout floor showed some rockwool board under concrete cement. I am thinking about using sylomer products, as plots put under the concrete board, in a way that connections with the original floor would be less critical.These kind of products have the advantage to provide technical pressure range data, so one can evaluate how much sound dampering is optimized. From there, you will get the insurance that your floating floor will be as efficient as possible. By comparison, with the rockwool board solution you would never know the exact density to use, depending on your concrete floor add-on weight.It would be difficult to predict how much the rockwool board will be crushed, and how dampering it would be.Or you may get these informations from any other similar situation, but there it is quite empirical. If you intend to use that system, think about putting plywood board after sylomer plots, in order to get a whole hard surface to put cement on. :idea: Well, please tell me more about your glassblocks...I am not really sure about which product you talk about.Are these kind of blocks the ones that we use in nice and lovely bathrooms? :)

Hi there Nightmusic...glad to see you back here...well glass blocks are exactly these bathroom things :D :D On the "moisture-water coming in" frontier you were absolutely right...i was talking to an engineer today who came to see my walls and he told me that fixing the actuall holes and cracks is not enough since water will find its way through another weak point on the wall...so here is what i'll do(probably the same with what you told)...i'm fixing the big cracks with foam and cement based water resistant caulk, then caulk all the wall in order to become smoother and not have little cracks and finally add a layer of cement based water proofing product probably like the one you've mentioned....i hope this will work... as for the floor...i'm checking on sylomer right now on the web.....i know all these dissadvantages of the rockwool but here in Greece is what most people would do....do you know anything about the kinetics RIM system...it is more or less the same thing like sylomer pads(i guess) but it comes in fixed in a "blanket" type roll ready for use...which seems to be pretty relaxing and easy to pour :)...as i get it you let them know how much load you want to lift on the pads(cncrete,walls,people,equipment etc) and they put the proper pad size and they space them correctly sending it ready for installation...the pads are made from very dense fiberglass

Hey, i think you're in the right direction about the way you are going to waterproof your wall, my friend ! :wink: About the RIM kinetics system, i didn't know it at all, but it seems it is the same kind of solution as Sylomer products.The reason why i thought about Sylomer was also because it seems to be used in most big recording studios in france...But it doesn't mean any other solution couldn't be equivalent, or better ! :D Here everything depends on which solution is available at the place where you will build your recording studio. In my case, i know i can get Auralex equivalent solution thru a dealer here in Paris, but it seems to be more expensive than Sylomer products. I can get Sylomer products thru a company dealing in France http://www.plastiforms.com/antivibratoire.htm Maybe you can ask them if there is a possibility for other countries? For RIM Kinetics system, the nearest dealer from Paris that i have found is in U.K., so i think i will do the same thing, and ask them if there's any possibility for dealing with them, and after that compare the resulting prices between Kinetics and Sylomer. :wink:

well i just found dealers for both Kinetics and Sylomer in Greece and e-mailed them....and now i'll wait :D Do you have a clue of the price range of these products?...please let me know if you do. I would also love to hear what are you're thinking to do about your wall structure...do you have any plans at the time?

Well, do you mean wall structure concerning waterproofing, or considering my acoustic treatment? About Sylomer costs, in a french forum i could get that information: 100€ for 30 plots 5cmX5cm...:roll: But still you'll have to know how many plots you would have to put, thus knowing how much weight it will need to handle. That is the reason why i didn't get deeper in the costs analysis for myself at the time.i still have to calculate all the materials weights that will relie on that floor, which isn't so easy. further, i am still stuck into the dilemna of floating my floor or not, since i read the thread here about that. Here in that french forum you can see Pics Sylomer installation example :http://fr.forums.audiofanzine.com/apprendre/mailing_forums/index,page,1,idtopic,208503,idsearch,0,idcat,45003.html I know the dealer can cut these sylomer boards in pieces as your request, that may be cheaper in that case than Rim kinetics since they come in rollboards as you said.... :?:

Actually i mean your wall structure regarding sound transmission loss and acoustical treatment... The RIM pads come in a rollboard but they are actually small fiber glass blocks glued on a fiber or plastic blanket in order to be placed easilly http://www.kineticsnoise.com/arch/rimconcrete.html regarding the concrete floating floor i think that if you are in a residential building this is probably the only way to keep the sound from travelling through the steel reinforced concrete structure of the building....i think that the thread you're refering to(i've read it 10 times!!!) is refering to buildings with no residents in them like garages or warehouses....i was reading on an Everest's book how the sound travels through the concrete reaching the upper floors where the walls act as membranes transmitting the sound to a room 2-3 floors above....and believe me i've experience on such a situation:we had a rehearsall room in this same basement back in 1995 and even though you could hear almost nothing right outside from it and completely nothing on the ground floor(which is an empty parking space) you could clearly hear the lower frequences from the drums and bass on some rooms on the first, second and even third floor!!!!! It wasn't very loud but it was loud enough to cause problems with the weird neighbour that sytrangely enough seems to exist on every building LOL On the other hand if you are the only resident of the building it's up to you to decide if you(and your family) can live with some low end booming through the walls...anyway it's a thing you should decide now cause there is no way to change your mind afterwards.... Nikodemos ps waiting for your sound walls,ceiling,floors ideas.....even better in my thread....in order to keep this a "moisture,flood" thread :D

Well, About the floating floor question, The building where i am about to build my recording studio is totally isolated from my house, as 50 meters far.It stands by itself, as there's only a basement. So my doubts are essentially focused on the isolation between different rooms inside that building.I wouldn't want to hear in the vocal booth any bass frequencies coming from the drums booth, for example. Further, i am asking if floating a floor on two wouldn't be a good solution... I will post a 'big' thread asap, resuming all my conclusions about my situation, you will find there everything i have understood and learned since the time when i first started this project. But i am going to your thread now for a quick description of my isolation parts... :wink:

well in that case i think that you could float only certain parts of your structure like for example the drum booth and leave the rest as it is....John Sayers proposed something like that in my thread....i mean if you go for a multi room complex you could build each romm depending to your needs...a heavier floating construction for drum booth - loud bass amps room and a lighter one for a multi purpose live room....check this(if you haven't allready :) ): http://forums.studiotips.com/viewtopic.php?t=1653 They are reffering to another method for decoupling room floors from each other by cutting the originall concrete slab creating a gap between each room floor....as i get it that is something that you can't and shouldn't do in bulding's concrete slab because it would be interfering with its foundations but since your basement is just a basement with nothing above maybe you should research it...and ask a few people about it