Our basement family room has an insulated ceiling but the bedrooms do not. One bedroom is below a bathroom and it gets very loud because of a water waste pipe. We have a storage room that has open access to the ceiling space. It would be about 20ft that we would have to push insulation into. This seems like it would be very hard with traditional roll insulation. It would be very easy to put some lengths of soundboard or xps or something in, but I don't know if it would achieve the desired effect. Thanks in advance.
i think blow in would work.
XPS - expanded polystyrene - would be a poor choice for sound insulation. Better than nothing, but not a great result for the money compared to some other choices. Fiberglass insulation does a surprisingly good job of reducing sound transmission. Add a ceiling to the joists above: suspended noise attenuation board - ask around at musical instrument stores for suggestions where to get that - can help a lot but it's pricier than other ceiling choices, so limit its use to where it's needed most: right around that pipe. If you're really sick of the noise, go nuts: Frame for a box of acoustic ceiling to go right around that entire pipe. Acoustic ceiling, also called drop ceiling tiles, again isn't everything it could be but it has the advantages of being cheap and easy to install. Make a trough that goes up against the floor above and box in that pipe. You might lose some tiles in the event of a future leak, but no biggie: the tiles are cheap. Now insulate around the box and under the floor above, same as you did elsewhere in the basement. Now install a dropped ceiling in the entire space. The noise from the pipe will probably still be audible, but it should be nothing like what it was.
