Neighbour complained about dryer

[alisonelli]

I have just had a text from my next door neighbour saying my tumble dryer is too loud and its "having a significant adverse impact on their quality of life".
For context, we live in detached houses, its on carpet in the utility room, I'd say there is at least 6ft gap between the houses, with cavity wall and a fence. I don't run it early in the morning or late at night. I'd say it runs between 10 and 3 if that. Its an eco one, so it does go on for about 3 hours, but uses little electricity. I have 2 kids, who play lots of sports and I have clothes I need to get dry.
What do I do?

I am all for being a quiet neighbour, but a dryer in a detached house? come on, that's a step too far.

Ask him to text you the next time he hears it and go straight round to listen.

My neighbour was adamant that some work we had had done had loosened the bricks in her chimney and she could her them falling down the back of her fire. Turned out to be magpies scrabbling around on her conservatory roof.

Missing the point but.....Where in the world do people live where they swap mobile numbers with neighbours?

I even go to the extreme of looking them up on FB to block them as soon as I find out their names 😂.

Because if you give an inch they'll take a mile. It is so unreasonable to be irritated by the hum of a dryer, I'm sure if it was faulty and made a racket the op may have noticed.

You pop round to analyse the horrid humming, next it's the parking, then it's the lawn mower etc etc.

Unreasonable, fussy neighbours are to be avoided. Obviously we should all be courteous I don't advocate late night parties every night but a tumbler dryer in a detached house? Wtaf.

It is nice to be neighbourly. Our neighbours look after our house while we are on holiday and we look after theirs when they are away.

Because if you start to humour delusional people you are enabling them. It won't stop after that. They will be complaining they can hear her coughing or turning the pages of a book.

We have a neighbour who has blamed almost everyone in the street of breaking his wing mirror. He complained about someone's dogs barking and it turned out he was setting them off by banging his bins and making barking noises at them. He has upset everyone in a 100 metres of his house.
Some people can't be reasoned with. Don't set off a spiral of constant complaining.

Sounds like a case of bullying and harassment to me.
Just ignore. If he persists, report to the police.

Text back I cant hear it outside my house so I think the noise must be from elsewhere but text me next time you hear it and I'll come and listen.

Are they NEETs if they're home between 10am-3pm?

Tell them their level of complaining about ordinary household noise during the day is not acceptable to us and we have used a dryer for many years without complaint.

Yep I would want to hear it from their perspective as you are being completely normal and reasonable but if they are willing to make this big complaint i would be concerned that they won't let this go. At least then you have evidence (record it) of this noise (?) and then say you have put the carpet down..that's all you can do..the end.

Ask them what time of day it’s bothering them. If they say 10pm then you know it’s something else.

I'd ask how/why, as surely if it's as you describe, theres something else that they think is your dryer?

On a side note, I spend half my time in a semi attached to a holiday let.

Several times, a holiday family has arrived and started their rental dyer almost immediately with the machine going virtually all the weekend! It's been on until 2am sometimes (DD can hear it in her room)

It doesn't bother me much and my bedroom is away from that side of the house.

I can only conclude that some people keep their washing/drying until they can use someone else's electricity!

I have never knowingly met the owner but I don't think I'd mention it anyway as they can hardly say there's a limit on usage. Or perhaps there are reasonable usage clauses. Not my monkeys anyway

There is surely no way they are hearing your dryer! My house is detached, our neighbours house closer than yours and I can't hear a thing from them unless all our doors are open and I'm at the back of the house in the summer. Even then it's loud talking/shouting/music/clattering of pans.

Even if they can hear it though, it's a dryer, not a screaming banshee. Washing machines are far noisier! What's the alternative? Wash everything by hand and never use the dryer?

I would go round though just to settle my curiosity if nothing else. If it was making a racket then I would do something about it but otherwise no.

Is it a condenser dryer or are you hanging a steaming pipe out the window?

Not that it should matter, but it could be that getting them riled.

I think if you’re trying to give advice about how to communicate with people calmly and politely and to assume the best of them, it’s probably best not to ask if they have anger issues and call them ‘hun’

NEET refers to a young person not in education, employment or training.

Maybe they need to get their hearing checked. Any other noises in the area that they could be mistaking as coming from your place?

But going around to try to understand their point of view is not indulging them. Simpering apology and immediately agreeing to stop using a dryer ever, or to install some pricey noise insulation or something, that would be indulging them.

Going around to have a listen isn't the same as agreeing with them that your dryer noise is a problem. It's trying to understand their point of view. As others have pointed out, there may be a different source of the noise for them, and pointing it out to them would a) enable them to address the noise if it's from within their property, and b) stop them from believing that OP is at fault, therefore facilitate neighbourly relations, which are something that are highly undervalued by a lot of mumsnetters so it seems.

It might be that the dryer is in fact having some kind of reverberation through to their property which is amplifying, and it might be that sticking it on a cheap rubber mat (mine's on my last car's rubber mats!) helps. It might be that nothing can be done about it, they end up disagreeing and the OP takes no further action; in which case, there's no difference in the level of "damage" done to the relationship than if OP were to block and ignore.

Good grief, that’s really mean.

The exact same thing happened to me - except my neighbour had a mental breakdown over the dryer and we couldn’t use it at all. I understood where she was coming from. She was sleep deprived and I believed her when she said it was so loud.

So I moved the dryer into a bedroom and just used it there.

This neighbour was never noisy, perfectly considerate. She was a young single mother. She had no one helping her and no one who could have a quiet word on her behalf - which is why she popped her head over the fence and screaming and begging for me to shut the dryer off.

Years later I was living somewhere else and my neighbour’s loser druggy son moved in. He spent all night walking past my bedroom window to the garage where he would smoke weed, listen to awful (loud) music and repeatedly clear phlegm from his throat. I couldn’t handle it any more and I moved.

I don’t have any issues with my current neighbours. We are in a housing crisis now so some houses have a lot of people living in them. My neighbours are still considerate. I think the big thing is that everyone works or are elderly and retired so they aren’t up all night partying.

I think what people are missing is that this noise is only going on between 10am and 3pm. During these hours you could be using a pneumatic drill, or an angle grinder without anyone really being able to interfere with your activity.

I would suggest texting the neighbours telling them you have taken all measures necessary to mitigate noise, only use the dryer between 10-3 and if they continue to have problems they should contact the local council. You can even include the number to make it easier for them. It might take a third party telling them that you don't have to be quiet during normal working hours for them to stop fault finding.

This is excellent.

As PP said, it’s possible there is an explanation and an easy solution. It may have nothing to do with your dryer. Why wouldn’t you help if you could do so easily? This might just involve pointing out issues with a new hearing aid for example, or spending £20 for a sound damping mat if the problem is real.

I don’t agree that this makes a person look weak or out of control. Of course if someone then tries to take advantage you must stand firm

Well said. Who knows, if it is really affecting their quality of life they may offer to buy the OP a quieter one. At least try to be a good neighbour and speak to them about it.

Well said.