There's a knocking noise in the roof of my gabled upstairs bedroom when the wind blows...

[_william]

Hi,

 

I live in a little cottage in Wales which was renovated from a disused barn 20 years ago. It's attached to an un-renovated barn built in the same style as itself. For a couple of years now whenever the wind blows a certain way there's this annoying knocking sound to be heard upstairs, i.e., in my bedroom. The following five links are for files in a Dropbox-folder, which are some resources to help explain this problem.

 

knocking noise emulated, visual.mp4

 

knocking noise emulated.mp3

 

knocking noise actual.m4a

 

roof-noise presentation.pdf

 

spring knock

 

The file-upload size here can't quite accommodate all of five of those files, though it can a few of them; so I'll attach right here "roof-noise presentation.pdf" and "knocking noise emulated.mp3", and then "knocking noise emulated, visual.mp4" at the bottom of the post (as the thumbnail for it is massive), in-case someone can't access Dropbox for some reason.

 

roof-noise presentation.pdf

 

knocking noise emulated.mp3

  

 

 

Page 1 of the PDF titled "roof-noise, presentation" shows what it looks like from outside, page 2 what it looks like inside upstairs, and page 3 is an aerial-view taken from google-earth—the cottage being the building marked in pink on that page. The MP3-file titled "knocking noise emulated" is my best-attempt at re-creating what the noise sounds like: I did that by recording myself letting a small plank of wood fall against a wall, so that it bounces a little as it hits, and then editing the recording in Audacity to alter the pitch and pace to try and imitate the noise itself. The MP4-video-file titled "knocking noise emulated, visual" just shows me doing that, to give you a better idea. Sometimes the knocking is a bit faster, sometimes a bit slower. The M4A-audio-file titled "knocking noise, actual" is a real recording of the noise itself, using the best microphone I have available, which is just an Ipad; but, this recording is so poor that it's easier to hear the whispers of ghosts in paranormal clip-compilations on YouTube than it is to hear the knocking noise in that recording; the clearest instance of the noise in that recording comes about 15 seconds before the end. Sometimes it sounds like the wind pushes whatever plank is making the noise against some surface for a few moments, before it lets it gently fall back to its default position, the plank making a knocking noise both as its held by the wind in that way and as it relaxes back; the MP4-video-file titled as "spring knock" is just me trying to better describe that by emulating it with a plank of wood against a wall.

 

The noise sounds like some loose plank hitting against something when being blown by the wind... I haven't determined any sort-of pattern with regards the direction of the wind: I thought at first that it only happened when a wind from an uncommon direction blew—the prevailing-wind being westerly—but that's not the case, and the noise will occur no matter which direction the wind blows from, it seems. It seems that if the wind is particularly strong then the noise won't occur.

 

A workman visited me to inspect the building but couldn't immediately see anything the matter with the fascia of the roof etc. . His only thought was that the gable-beam of the adjoining barn, which is marked-out in image 4 on the first page of that "roof-noise presentation" PDF, was a bit loose, and so he put a bolt through it to fasten it, but I don't think that helped much with the problem actually.

 

The fourth page of that "roof-noise, presentation" PDF shows the interior of another disused barn which is nearby to my home. I imagine that its roof is constructed more-or-less identically to my own. I include the images on that page of that PDF just so that anyone who has any ideas about what could be going on inside the roof can reference them as they explain their ideas.