Drip... drip... drip drip... drip.

March 24, 2016 3:55 PM

Our neighbour's downpipe drips most nights, even though we haven't had any rain for days, and it's kind of driving us crazy. How can we stop it?

We have a standalone, two storey suburban house which is situated in a street of standalone two storey suburban houses, with about 5-6m between houses, in a very quiet area (no traffic noise). Our master bedroom has a long 2.4 x 0.6m window which faces our northerly neighbour; our bed is immediately beneath this window.

Many (but not all) nights, we go to sleep, with our air conditioning on (so all the windows and doors closed; it's still hot like the surface of the sun down here in subtropical Australia), in total peace and quiet. At some point during the night, the dripping will start. If we're both already asleep, this is perfectly fine and won't wake us... but I'm 25 weeks pregnant and, more and more, I wake up during the night. To the dripping. The incessant, ever-so-slightly irregular dripping. It drives into my skull, grabs ahold, and does. not. let. go.

I slept through the night last night, but when we woke up this morning the dripping was, unusually, still going. So, like any 6-month-pregnant, baby-brained lady, I got out my binoculars and started scoping out their place. Turns out I didn't need the binoculars; they have a downpipe from the top level of their roof to a lower level on "our" side of their house, and it's dripping water -- those drips don't coincide with the drips we can hear, but the downpipe has a 90° turn in it (from a ~2m vertical section to a ~30cm horizontal section) just before it ends, and we guess that the dripping is therefore from the top of the vertical section right down to the bottom, which is what makes it so loud.

We can combat the dripping sound to some extent with earplugs, but unfortunately the foam ones hurt my ears after a couple of hours, and the silicone ones never seem to be quite sticky enough to really form a good seal (so either I can still hear the dripping, or get periodic buzzing as the pressure equalises during the night). Additionally, when our baby comes, earplugs are not going to be such a viable option for us.

We absolutely do NOT want drama with this neighbour: they're older than us (teen/uni aged kids) and seem friendly, but we're not "friends" with them, per se. The last thing we want is to confront them with an issue and have them take it poorly, or for the floodgates to open for them to start complaining back to us about whatever niggles they may have (especially since we have a baby coming). We've heard too many horror stories about neighbourly disputes turning into full on wars, and we don't want to do anything to jeopardise the friendly non-relationship we currently have with them.

So, questions:

1. Why on earth would their gutters/downpipes have enough water in them to drip all night, every night, but not during the day (e.g., at 6:30am this morning it was visibly & audibly dripping, but now at 8:30am it's not visibly or audibly dripping)? We've had very little rain in our area (0.8mm on Wednesday, but nothing on Tuesday or Thursday -- it's currently Friday morning) -- and we *get* very little rain in general (we get precipitation only 80 days a year, according to BoM). Anecdotally this dripping happens most nights, regardless of the rain situation, and it doesn't ease in frequency or regularity as the night passes, other than when it just stops at some point in the morning.
2. How can we minimise the sound of the dripping? Just keep using earplugs, even though they're non-optimal? Should we talk to our neighbour, and if so, how can we minimise the chance of them taking offense (unlikely, but still), or opening the floodgates for them to complain straight back at us? Especially considering that while I'm 95% sure it's this downpipe (cause it's clearly dripping), there's a small chance it might be something else (e.g., what if it's a downpipe on *our* house, with the sound reflecting back off their windows?). FWIW they have windows on that side of their house but I'm pretty sure the immediately adjacent windows are bathrooms, from the size & shape.

posted by snap, crackle and pop to Home & Garden (19 answers total)

Dripping from some kind of AC / cooling system?
posted by ClaudiaCenter at 4:01 PM on March 24, 2016 [8 favorites]

You could mention you hear dripping all night even when it's not raining and you're concerned that it might be some kind of leak.
posted by WesterbergHigh at 4:03 PM on March 24, 2016 [6 favorites]

Can you stick a plant underneath it to catch the noise? Leave a note on their door or ask your husband to bring it over himself and tell them that your hormones are making everyone crazy and here is a plant to keep you from going off the deep end. They will understand. They may even be concerned about why it is always dripping and decide to have someone look at it.

But, before you do that, check your ac drip pan. It might be just full enough that it is starting to overflow after running for several hours at night.
posted by myselfasme at 4:03 PM on March 24, 2016 [2 favorites]

Yeah my guess is a rooftop air conditioner. I assume they turn it off during the day when they're gone.
posted by crazy with stars at 4:04 PM on March 24, 2016

Can you get to the downspout in question? Maybe a thin piece of flat flexible foam cut to just line the bottom of the 30cm section would dampen the sound? Since it's really thin stuff and only lining the bottom it shouldn't block the flow of water in a storm, though it may wash out periodically.
posted by cecic at 4:07 PM on March 24, 2016 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Ours are doing this too lately, and I'm sure it's related to the aircon somehow, but haven't figured it out exactly. It happens a few hours after the aircon has been on but the pipe is not close to the outdoor unit at all. I think somehow condensation is being created that eventually starts precipitating into that pipe. We had a plumber over to try and figure it out and they went eh, who knows. And we had a gutter cleaner clean out the drain pipe just in case that was connected to the problem, but no.

That pipe is close to our neighbour's house, and I am really worried that it might be disturbing them. If you were them and you came and talked to me about it, I would not be mad at you at all. I would be mortified, and I would solicit your ideas for what I could do about it, and I would probably start baking you tasty treats regularly to try to make up for it.
posted by lollusc at 4:08 PM on March 24, 2016

Oh also, as an example of the other case, when the drippers were unaware of the issue, when we first moved in our other neighbours had a dripping hot water tank near our bedroom water. We could only really hear it at night and it drove us insane, but we didn't want to annoy them when we were new in the neighbourhood, so we put off saying anything as long as possible. And then we snapped and my husband went next door to ask them if there was anything they could do about it. They were really sweet, and gave him tea and biscuits, and promised to get a plumber to look at it right away, and they did, and it stopped the very next day. Since then it's happened a couple more times, but they must be keeping an eye on it, because they put a towel under the spout that drips, which damps the noise enough to not cause issues for us.

So another example of it not necessarily causing problems to talk to people about this sort of thing.
posted by lollusc at 4:12 PM on March 24, 2016 [1 favorite]

You should probably get a white noise machine. Maybe invest in two -- one for you, and one for your future babe.
posted by Hermione Granger at 4:25 PM on March 24, 2016 [3 favorites]

If an obviously pregnant neighbor came over and treated this sort of like a hilarious, though maddening, thing that is happening, I would not be offended. Just go talk to them. It would be great if you could really confirm that it is this particular downspout. Your partner can get in the act, too, by pledging to fix this issue for the good of the baby!

There are a couple things that you want to figure out -

1. Where the dripping is happening. Could it be in the walls? Do the neighbors hear it, too?
2. Once discerned, what's causing it? You need to know if something is malfunctioning or if this is a more natural issue.
3. How to fix it.

Talk to your neighbors.
posted by amanda at 4:49 PM on March 24, 2016

Seconding the idea that you are currently in the perfect state to address this--in my experience, people are very accommodating of visibly pregnant women. Blame it on the hormones if it helps, but I agree that a noise like that would be annoying to anyone.
posted by Jemstar at 5:12 PM on March 24, 2016 [8 favorites]

You have the permission of this internet stranger to go talk to them without using your pregnancy as an excuse.

BTW, it sounds like a blocked condensation line which has water dripping into the pan. Getting it unblocked is pretty cheap.
posted by 26.2 at 5:41 PM on March 24, 2016 [2 favorites]

I'm having trouble visualizing the piping involved here; if it's 35cm or less plumber's pipe, I'd think water would usually trickle along the inside surfaces and very rarely be able to fall 2m through the air and hit the inside bottom where the pipe goes horizontal and make a noise there. If it's stovepipe size maybe, but it still seems kind of unlikely to me.

I think you should look around carefully for some other source for the drip.
posted by jamjam at 6:31 PM on March 24, 2016 [1 favorite]

Best answer: I had a faucet that was driving me crazy, dripping into the sink. I put a big kitchen sponge under the drip until I could fix it. It worked.
posted by chrillsicka at 6:37 PM on March 24, 2016

2nd the sponge. I had a dripping downspout outside the window at an old house. Sponge in the drainpipe to catch the drips worked. Just an old kitchen sponge. But you should probably ask your neighbor first.
posted by gnutron at 7:28 PM on March 24, 2016

Sponges worked for me! I found some designed for just this purchase at the hardware store which have a thin, flat magnet glued to one side of the sponge. Park one up in the bottom of the angled outlet section of the downspout.
posted by Rash at 8:10 PM on March 24, 2016 [1 favorite]

Personally I wouldn't put a sponge under your neighbors downspout without asking them first like gnutron suggested.
posted by futz at 10:02 PM on March 24, 2016 [1 favorite]

The traditional solution to muffling a dripping icebox is a brick; I learned this while researching a brick murder.
posted by Scram at 11:19 PM on March 24, 2016 [1 favorite]

If my neighbor started messing around with sponges and plants on my property, that's a sure fire way to guarantee I'll never cooperate with that neighbor, ever.
posted by humboldt32 at 3:11 AM on March 25, 2016 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Thanks for your input everyone. We feel kind of stupid though, cause the last two nights we've had our A/C off and there's been no dripping sound... even though our neighbours' "culprit" downpipe has been visually dripping! So we think maybe it's actually condensation from *our* A/C somehow draining into one of our downpipes (we have two near our bedroom).

(We'd previously discounted this because our A/C unit is on the ground on the other side of the house, but as lollusc pointed out condensation doesn't necessarily happen just at the unit, so further investigation is required.)
posted by snap, crackle and pop at 1:55 PM on March 27, 2016 [1 favorite]