Drywall w/lead layer helpful ?

realkuhl · Post by **realkuhl** » Fri Jul 22, 2005 8:46 am

The other side of one of the studio walls is the wash room where a new Whirlpool Washer and Dryer are sitting. My electrician mentioned to me that a large amount of interference is created by the engines in these since there is no housing around the motors. So the idea of using the Drywall that has a small layer of lead came up. The width of the lead is from 2 to 5 mm I believe and I'm curious if anybody here thinks this would be worth making the back of the wall layered with this instead of the normal 2 layers of 5/8" that I'm planning to do.

Thanks in advance for any input !

-John Lehmkuhl

knightfly · Post by **knightfly** » Fri Jul 22, 2005 9:06 am

I wouldn't - lead, if grounded, might reduce fields a bit but Inverse Square law is on your side; unless you MUST run low level audio signals within a couple feet of this area, I'd worry more about those pesky "wall warts" - some of those radiate so bad it's scary. I once made the mistake of running an 18" SHIELDED phone cord from a Symetrix 525 into a power amp (had an extra "wart" plugged into the aux AC outlet of the amp) and the resulting hum in system was deafening.

One thing you may want to do; if those cheap open-frame motors are to be on the same leg as your studio power, it wouldn't hurt to install some "quench-arc" suppressors (or similar) right at the motor terminals to keep electrical noise (as opposed to EMI) under control... Steve

realkuhl · Post by **realkuhl** » Sat Jul 23, 2005 1:43 am

Thanks, Steve. They are on their own circuit so I guess I'm in good shape there.....

Thanks for the reply !
-John Lehmkuhl

knightfly wrote:I wouldn't - lead, if grounded, might reduce fields a bit but Inverse Square law is on your side; unless you MUST run low level audio signals within a couple feet of this area, I'd worry more about those pesky "wall warts" - some of those radiate so bad it's scary. I once made the mistake of running an 18" SHIELDED phone cord from a Symetrix 525 into a power amp (had an extra "wart" plugged into the aux AC outlet of the amp) and the resulting hum in system was deafening.

One thing you may want to do; if those cheap open-frame motors are to be on the same leg as your studio power, it wouldn't hurt to install some "quench-arc" suppressors (or similar) right at the motor terminals to keep electrical noise (as opposed to EMI) under control... Steve