I put up the electrical wall. It's OSB, floor muffler, and green glue wall-board sandwich so I can screw all the electrical power stuff to it. It's about 3' wide and held by 6 rows of channel with 2 clips a piece. It's rattling badly. So I tested the front wall which currently has a single layer of wall board. It also rattled a bit but not as much.
I'm plagued with this rattle stuff. I've looked at it a few times now and discover something off each time. The list of (possible/probable) rattle problems found before this were:
- Over torquing a wall board screw pulls the screw hole in the channel outward causing the hole to enlarge. Now besides the screws rattling in the hole they no longer hold the wallboard onto the channel. Not good if the ceiling falls on you! At the time, I thought this might be causing the rattle. Now I think the rattle was really something else.
- the vertical alignment of the clips was off. This had the issue of having the wall weight distributed unevenly over the set of clips. The clips holding the wall would be forced downward sometimes shorting to the wall while some clips had no weight allowing the channel to rattle in them,
- The studs were not all in the same plane. Some were bowed, others miss aligned. This pushed/pulled the clips twisting the channel. So some clips wanted to twist up and others down. Again some clips had no weight and were probably rattling. If you look closely at the pictures of the open wall with channel over it you will see the clips had to be shimmed out to get them onto the same plane.
This time I'm pretty sure I know what's going on. But you're gonna have wait for the next post to find out.
Ah geez that sucks for sure. One of the negative things i read about use of metal channels for HT came back to potential for rattles. For us living in lower Manitoba means building/living on mud, essentially. The house moves seasonally, or parts of it. Cracks, lifts, slopes, in walls, ceilings, floors, drywall, all very common. In putting our HT together, we stuck with materials that wouldn't rattle if such a house shift popped a screw or misaligned something.
There's pluses and minuses.
All that being said, i mentioned long ago about some rattle in our back wall that relates to the QS8 located near the sound, but i've never been able to track it down beyond something in the wall structure in the general area. Thankfully it only presents itself on loud, bassy occasions and once all the new surrounds come in, things will be adjusted. However, that could make it worse rather than better.
We'll see.
In our old house we had a rattle that showed up after we got all of our 5.1 Axiom system. I narrowed that one down to the electrical panel enclosure door. A few soft door bumpers solved the issue.
Perhaps setting up the new sub in the room and playing back some bassy material will help as you search for the rattling source.
