First World Problems: loud fountain pump

Calica

I bought this fountain a while back. The bells and running water sounded soothing and peaceful in the store. But in my much quieter apartment, all I hear is the pump. If I concentrate, I can listen to the water and bells; but it's like my brain zeroes in on the hum of the pump, and it annoys me so much I can't enjoy the fountain. I've tried putting sound-absorbing material under it, and even setting it directly on my carpeted floor, but the pump noise still overpowers the fountain noise.

Now, it may just be a crappy pump - I've no way of knowing. I know there's no such thing as a silent pump, but can anyone recommend a really quiet one?

SmokeStacks

If you're interested in just having soothing background noise, you could always just play some through a set of speakers.

You could always just play audio through your computer or home theater speakers, but at a studio I used to live in I used an old spare 2GB .mp3 player plugged into a USB cable plugged into a USB/AC adapter so it would constantly charge, connected it to a decent set of powered 2.1 speakers, and hid the whole thing behind a couch/endtable. Ambient noise .mp3s are freely available all over the net (everything from watter babbling to a wood fire to rainstorms to tv static to the clacking of train tracks to a water heater/furnace to the warp engine background noise of the Starship Enterprise and more), so I just threw them on the mp3 player, picked the one I wanted, and set it to loop. Because it was behind some furniture the sound bounced around a bit more, so it really felt like it was an ambient noise, as opposed to coming from one specific place in the room.

That doesn't exactly answer your question, but it's something to think about if you can't find a way to quiet the pump.

notmetalenough

Do you have enough water in the reservoir? Can you clean the pump? There are a lot of things that would make pumps louder than they ought to be.

If you've got enough water and the pump is clean and working fine, there's not much else you can do about the noise.

Midshipman

What kind of contact does the pump have with the bowl (aside from the tubing)? If you could entirely surround the pump/motor with sound insulating material, including between the pump and the bowl you would be much better off noise-wise, but you'd potentially risk overheating the motor. Depending on the type of pump, you might be getting some of the noise from air in the suction tubing. If that's the case then carefully priming or rerouting the suction line to be entirely below the surface of the water could help (but the latter would involve cutting into the bowl and then carefully sealing around the tube penetration. The last possibility is noise coming from fluid flow on the discharge side of the pump, which could be addressed by making sure there are no sharp changes of flow direction or replacing with a larger tube/passageway.

If you decide to try your luck with a different pump, try to find one that is driven at a slower rpm but with the same capacity (likely a larger pump), and be aware that you will most likely need to get adapters to connect to your suction and discharge tubing. I'd be suprised if the fountain uses any kind of standardized size for fittings.

Esh

SmokeStacks wrote: »

If you're interested in just having soothing background noise, you could always just play some through a set of speakers.

You could always just play audio through your computer or home theater speakers, but at a studio I used to live in I used an old spare 2GB .mp3 player plugged into a USB cable plugged into a USB/AC adapter so it would constantly charge, connected it to a decent set of powered 2.1 speakers, and hid the whole thing behind a couch/endtable. Ambient noise .mp3s are freely available all over the net (everything from watter babbling to a wood fire to rainstorms to tv static to the clacking of train tracks to a water heater/furnace to the warp engine background noise of the Starship Enterprise and more), so I just threw them on the mp3 player, picked the one I wanted, and set it to loop. Because it was behind some furniture the sound bounced around a bit more, so it really felt like it was an ambient noise, as opposed to coming from one specific place in the room.

That doesn't exactly answer your question, but it's something to think about if you can't find a way to quiet the pump.

This is what I do. There are all sorts of apps available for this as well if you have an iPhone/Touch/Pad.

Calica

Thanks for the suggestions.