When we turned the air compressor on for the first time, it became obvious to everyone (including, and perhaps especially, the cats) that this needed to be a little less noisy. That's what we get for buying an oil-less compressor, I suppose. Fortunately, other RV builders like Dan Checkoway have run into this problem before and Dan's been kind enough to document what he did to fix it. We decided to do essentially the same thing, i.e., build a noise reduction box for it, even though our compressor is shaped a bit differently than Dan's. (Oh - if you are planning to build a box around yours like we did, or like Dan did, you may want to consider getting the vertical kind instead of the horizontal kind. I think it might be easier and take up less room.)
In any case, here is the result. All of the things that we used you can get from your local home improvement store, except perhaps the egg crate foam which you can get from Wal-Mart. (Or - ahem - pull it out of your family's old sleeping bag pads when your mother is not looking . . . and hopefully not reading this website too carefully.)
Here's the box - so far it's just a box, so there's a bit of work to do yet. |
Door at the bottom for draining the water out of the tank. |
Starting to get egg crate foam on the inside. |
Easy way to cut the foam - electric knife from the kitchen! |
The compressor in its new home. |
What the corner of the garage looks like now. |
Does it work? It works well - better than we expected, in fact. We can turn it on with the garage door closed, the cats don't freak out, and we can talk without yelling at each other. Yay! This was worth it, no questions asked. Depending on how much scrap wood you've got around, this could be pretty cheap. The cost would probably be mostly hinges, egg crate foam, and elbow grease.
For a few finishing touches we put handles on the outside and foam window sealer on the bottom to help with the noise and vibration. These may or may not have been strictly necessary but I'm glad we did it.
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