Please help me to identify high pitched noise in my house

[pileoflaundry]

I am being driven insane by a high pitched noise in my house, and I am completely failing to track it down.

The noise is still there when my washing machine, dishwasher and fridge freezer are all off. I can't hear the noise outside, only indoors.

The noise is not continuous. It's not very loud, but is getting louder, and is on for longer each time. Right now it's been going for 45 minutes. It's been going on for weeks.

I live in a terraced house. The noise seems loudest in my kitchen, but it's hard to tell. The house is open plan and the noise is quite disorientating so I can't tell where it comes from. I thought for a while that it might be next door's washing machine on a high spin, but it goes on too long, unless the machine makes the noise for the whole cycle(?). I can't hear a motor.

I thought that it might be related to my heating, but that, and the hot water, went off nearly 3 hours ago. I'm not running any taps. I have a chimney with some aerials attached, is it possible that one of them is vibrating at a natural frequency and sending the noise through the house? I can't get up there easily to check.

Does anyone have any ideas? All help much appreciated, especially if it won't involve me needing to climb out onto my roof.

Worth adding that my DH can hear the noise too, so it's not just my ears/head.

(I have two small DC so might not be able to check back frequently, sorry. On the plus side I can't hear the high pitched noise when the DC are in full swing...).

[RubberDuck]

"Although NDN has hung out washing today and mentioned mice a few days ago... this isn't going to end well is it..." - I would lay odds on it being a sonic mouse deterrent.

[CloneMeNow]

I had this in a flat. It turned out to be some equipment in the roof space above all the flats (fans or something - one of them was a bit bent and causing high pitched vibrations). You wouldn't have known it was coming from there, because the vibrations passed through solid things like walls and joists. Is there anything in your loft?

You mention mice - could they have chewed through insulating material meaning that metal parts are rubbing on each other somewhere?

[chunkymum1]

You mention you live in a terrace house- have you mentioned this to either of the neighbours that you share a wall with? I had an annoying noise much like this which went on for weeks- had turned the house upside down looking for the source when our neighbour returned from an extended break and came round to apologise for the fact that the battery had gone in one of her alarms and it was making a high pitched noise that we 'might' have heard!

[User543212345]

With us it was our cordless phones and it drove me batty for years before I worked it out - not helped by the noise being intermittent and DH insisting there wasn't a noise at all. Obviously turning the power off did nothing because the battery in the phone handset was still charged. Could it be that?

[VulcanWoman]

The two odd humming things I had were a low energy light bulb and a digital clock.

[AnnieOnnieMouse]

My pc makes a high pitched noise.
The florescent lights in the kitchen did, too, until dh replaced them with LEDS. I am sensitive to noise, and can hear stuff dh can't. I used to be able to hear bats until a few years ago. Now I just am...

[lborolass]

Are you sure it's not a battery operated toy in which the battery is running down but occasionally has enough energy to run the toy for a while.

Check they toy box

[RubberDuck]

Annie: I can hear bats too! DH definitely thinks I'm crazy when I tell him that.

[MamehaSan]

Our old electricity meter used to make a high-pitched buzzing noise sometimes. It drove me potty but DH with his man hearing that also fails to hear DC crying in the night was never bothered by it. Obviously it won't be affected by turning things off at the fuse box / consumer unit. Could it be that?

[JeVoudrais]

Heating? One of my radiators does this high pitched eeeeeeeeeeeeeee the whole time the heating is on and it just so happens I always have the heating on so didn't link it.

[PigletJohn]

"I switched power off at the fuse box and water at the stop cock, but the noise continued."

so it is not caused by something supplied from your electricity circuits or downstream of the stopcock.

Where is the stopcock?

Do you get the noise at night, when your neighbours are asleep, or when they are out?

Does it correspond to times they might have been using taps or flushing WC?

You say it is a high-pitched noise. These do not easily carry through walls, except if it is a water pipe embedded in a floor or wall. If you can lay your hands on a young person, they will be better able to hear high frequencies and might be able to tell where it is coming from, especially if it is muffled when you close a door and the noise is on the other side.

[pileoflaundry]

Thank you everyone for all the new ideas. Some of them are quite worrying...

DC have just gone to bed, so I am back on the case.

I have checked the radiators and their thermostats, and smoke alarms (bar one that I couldn't reach, but as far as I could tell the noise wasn't coming from it).

We don't have a loft but we do have a walled-up space where the water tanks used to be. I don't think that there was a fan in there, but there was an old aerial and some pipes and now potentially bats. I can't get into it without knocking down a wall.

Thankfully I haven't seen any mice, or any traces of them. Yet.

I have two potential leads.

a. The bathroom extractor fan has a background noise which rises and falls a tiny bit every 2 or 3 seconds, but in exactly the same way as The Noise.

I double-checked the PC and everything else that I think has a fan, just in case the fan keeps going even when the electricity is off, but I couldn't spot the culprit.

b. Next door's boiler flue is right next to the wall between our houses. It mostly makes an air-swishing noise, but there was also something that sounded like a faint fan, which I am guessing is either sucking air in, or expelling it, or both. I wouldn't have thought it possible for this to reverberate through our whole house, but maybe like Clone said it's possible?

The Noise has now stopped. I am off to investigate smartphone apps.

[pileoflaundry]

I'm sorry PigletJohn, I forgot to refresh before posting and didn't spot your reply.

The stop cock is about 2 feet inside the garage door. The water meter is about 4 or 5 meters in front of the house, and there is a straight pipe connecting the two (I know this as we had to have everything re-plumbed and re-wired when we moved in).

I spot the noise mostly in the early mornings (6-7am), or late at night (9-10pm), but this is in part to it only being noticeable when the DC are asleep and I am trying to sleep or read. I'm up a bit in the night with the DC but have never noticed it then. Today the noise has been on about 50% of the day.

Yes, it could definitely be when the neighbours could be using taps or flushing the loo.

The noise has stopped now, but when it starts I'll see if it's any different on different sides of doors - it does feel to be everywhere, from the cellar up to the second floor.

I have a couple of young neighbours, I will ask it they will be up for a bit of sleuthing tomorrow must tidy the house.

[MissSmiley]

Our electric toothbrush charger makes this noise. It's plugged into a razor socket. It took me ages to work out where it was coming from.

[plantsitter]

You're not making kimchee or doing any pickling are you? That can make a noise.

[PigletJohn]

Age 12 is better than age 30. I can't remember how old I was when I stopped hearing bats, but it is definitely age-related. Use of music headphones and attendance at noisy concerts is associated with loss of hearing, especially upper registers. Then, later, machinery, power tools, and motorcycles.

[PigletJohn]

If the neighbours have a cold water tank in the loft (i.e. they have not got a combi boiler or a Megaflo) it might run for 20 minutes when they have a bath or shower. A WC cistern should only be a couple of minutes.

[pileoflaundry]

I now want to eat kimchee.

The noise was back at 7am and has been going strong since. It's louder than before as I can now hear it with the DC running around .

I can also now just about hear the noise when I open the back door, step outside, and follow the noise to my neighbour's boiler flue. It looks like a concentric flue (so air in and out in the same pipe, I think). It's still not very loud by the flue, but louder, or at least clearer, than yesterday.

I'm not convinced that the flue, or rather the fan in the flue, can be responsible for reverberating the noise through my whole house. Could it be that the flue fan is making a very similar noise, and something else is making the noise in my house?

I know that in normal circumstances people would just speak to their neighbours, but I'm worried that it could make things worse.

There is also the possibility that the noise is actually driving me mad and I just think that I hear it everywhere... I'll get DH to check when he gets back in.

[PigletJohn]

boiler fans tend to speed up and slow down according to heat demand. If a combi, will be fastest while a bath or shower is being run (you will see steam if outside temp is cold). Will ramp up from slow to high when the radiators first come on cold, then will ease off as they reach target temperature (might take 15 minutes or so) and slow down to minimum speed. However the pump, when radiators are on, will (mostly) run at constant speed, and will only go off when the timer or the room thermostat turns it off. The pump, if worn, will send vibrations through the pipework, which will run throughout the house, mostly under the floors, and will usually be clamped to walls at some points.

[pileoflaundry]

The noise has been off for a couple of hours. It's been bliss.

I've been outside 5 times to see if the neighbour's boiler has been on or off. It's corresponded to the noise being on or off every time (3 times on, 2 times off).

The noise sometimes goes off for 10 or 15 minutes, which sounds like it could be a thermostat turning things off and then on. Although I could just be fitting the theory to the facts.

[pileoflaundry]

The noise stopped at 21:47 last night, which was the exact same time as the previous night, and the night before that.

The noise has been on since just after 7am, as has next door' boiler. It was loud for the first 15-20 minutes and since then has been at just the right level to send me mad.

To make it worse, all the trying to track it down over the weekend has meant that I've now tuned into other annoying noises that I hadn't heard before, like my induction hob .

I'm going to have to talk to next door aren't I...

[CaurnieBred]

Oops - sorry for pointing out the hob whine

[pileoflaundry]

Apologies for the late update, my DC came down with D&V and then kindly shared it with me.

Don't worry Caurnie, it's best to know where the annoying noises are coming from. And now that I'm no longer trying to tune into the noise, the other noises have faded too, so I can use my hob without wincing!

We had some younger guests and challenged them to find the source of the noise. They tracked it down to next door's boiler flue.

Thank you everyone for your help and great ideas. Once I've recovered I will talk to the neighbours.

[VBolster]

I’m not kidding - check to see if you have a battery-powered digital meat thermometer in your kitchen. We were going bonkers with a high-pitched noise (sounded like it was coming from the ceiling) and my husband started hunting through the drawers after we’d tried everything else. The thermometer wasn’t on, but somehow still made the noise. No more, thank goodness!