The Many Benefits of Hiring a Consultant

When running a dog boarding facility, it's important to keep noise down as much as possible. The sound of loud barking ringing through your kennels can cause a nuisance in multiple ways, from giving staff a headache and upsetting the other dogs to angering neighbours into filing noise complaints. Of course, it can be difficult to stop dogs from barking, especially when they're away from their homes and owners. That means you need to adapt your facility to reduce how much these barking sounds are amplified.

The best way to do that is to hire a specialist acoustical consultant with experience in dampening animal noise. Before you book an appointment with an acoustical consultant, take a look at these two possible ways they might help.

Lining the Walls with Acoustic Panels

Have you ever noticed that your boarding kennels seem unreasonably noisy? Often, barking sounds seem much louder in dog boarding facilities than they would if the same number of dogs were barking in a house. This is because most boarding kennels have large rooms with hard walls, floors and ceilings, unlike houses which tend to have smaller rooms and more soft surfaces. These conditions amplify sound exponentially, making each bark headache-inducing. One of the best ways to combat this is to line the walls with acoustic panels. These soft panels absorb loud sounds in your boarding facility, reducing the echoes and reverberation that make the dogs sound louder than normal. Acoustic panels come in a variety of colours and shapes to suit your décor, and they attach easily to the surface of your walls, so you won't have to rebuild your facility from scratch like you would with other sound-blocking treatments.

Creating Outdoor Noise Barriers

If, like in most boarding kennels, you have an outdoor area where dogs play or reside, you'll want to take noise-reducing measures there too. While outdoor noise might not be bothersome to dogs or staff, it's a common cause of neighbour complaints and local authority fines. There are two ways to create a noise barrier in the outdoor section of your boarding facility. The first is to have acoustic fencing put up. These fence panels (usually made from wood) are specially constructed and treated to absorb noise and stop it from spreading to neighbouring properties. Acoustic fencing is usually the most attractive option, but it can be pricy if you have a large perimeter to cover. If you'd rather keep your existing fences, the alternative option is to use sound blankets (also known as sound curtains) to keep noise in. Sound blankets are made from noise-dampening material and can be hung on the typical chain-link fences used in boarding kennels, making them low-cost and effective.