Straw bale, anybody?

[lupiphile]

              I am currently considering rebuilding my shop and the sound suppression aspects of straw bale seem greatly appealing. My shop is dead smack in the middle of a row homed-city block and I'd lobe to be able to run my hammers whenever I felt like it, I'm also cheap to the point of being able to squeeze blood from a penny, and am extremely cold adverse so straw bale seems like an obvious choice. What are y'all's feelings towards said building systems? I was thinking of making a metal frame (one day I'll have my bridge crane and eat it too) and doing straw bale infill.I've heard tale of condensation issues with metal siding and I'd imagine this would be detrimental to a straw bale wall. My shop, after the build out would be about, 55'x40'x12'-14'. Any insights or experiences would be nice.

                Oh and to make it clear before this becomes a "how do I appeal to my neighbors, sensibilities and get them to stop calling the fire department every time I want to make a bottle opener out of a railroad spike, thread ( should all of that been hyphenated?) I do this for a living and have the legal right to make as much buisness related noise from 8 am- 8pm monday through sat., as I like, I just need more time than that, And I'm not trying to ruin their lives(my neighbor, Tahera,actually reports of dishes falling off shelves,in her kitchen, from where my primary hammer is mounted now) I think maybe straw bale is the way. Take Care, Matt

[Charles R. Stevens]

What makes straw bale work is the ability of the bales to breath. Vapor baririers like steel, plastic, concrete ect. Traps moisture. Cob or adobe brick alows just a bit of moister to migrate, wile providing additional structural support, enhanced fire resistance and resistance to mechanical damage. Wile being easy to repair. Depending on rainfall deep verandas will protect the walls from erosion. Lime plaster and white wash are the finishes of choice. Cement stucco has destroid more adobes than I can count in the southwest. For your application my thaught is that whitewashed adobe would provide a pleasing aperiance to your buisness, as well as being dirt cheep. Not including labor. Cob with strawbale infill is more organic looking, but provides a thiner wall, say 2' if the bales 2 string on edge, wile the adobe and bale wall withe the bales on edge will be about 3 foot. Noise will certainly be abated better by the massive walls.
As to an infill wall, materials that alow some air flow work, the Georgia governess mansion uses straw bale infill, plaster interior and shiplap siding.
So a couple of layers of fire rated drywall with out PVA would probbably work on the inside, with cement lap siding on the outside, with breathable house wrap and no vapors barier.
As to fire. Tightly packed bales are by nature fire resistant, lose straw not so much. A fire resistant exterior such as drywall, adobe, cob or mud plaster makes for a very fire resistant structure, if sparks can't get in and air is excluded it won't burn, even if it dose it will smolder. If it smoldered "rehab" is very destructive as you have to tear in to the wall to extinguish it.
Note, earthquake resistant construction methods exist for adobe, with large hammers one would want to reenforce te wall structure (standard block wall reinforcement "ladders" should suffice.
Be worned I'm not an architect or structural engineer , just an old boy with a nack for building things .

[ThomasPowers]

will any zoning allow it?

[Charles R. Stevens]

It's allowed in newmexico and other southwest states. Might have to get a engineer or architect to sighn off (good idea for an industrial space anyway). The fire resistance and structural capacities have been tested.
So examples of code as well as code compliance exist, second, in most jurisdictions, if its sighned off on by a engineer and/or architect then it's code compliant by default.

[Jim Kehler]

I am working in a staw bale shop I built just over three years ago. I put up a post and beam and wrapped it with bales, high lime content stucco inside and out. It is 39' x 39' with a 12' ceiling. To say I am happy with it would be a huge under-statement.

[Fe-Wood]

I don't know of any studies that measure sound absorption with straw bale walls. If your jurisdiction hasn't approved straw bale construction before then you may have to educate the building dept. Even then, some are hesitant. If you want cheap, straw bale isn't it. They can cost 10 to 20% more than stick built and much more than a steel sided building. I'm not trying to talk you out of straw bale its a good building medium when used in the right situation. 

 

Another system to think about is CIF or Concrete insulated forms. Not the Styrofoam ones but the ones with polystyrene balls suspended in a concrete slurry. http://www.rastra.com/ is one supplier and http://www.performwall.com/ is another. Again, I don't know what sound absorption factor they have. They don't have any of the issues straw bale does (just other ones). As a structure it could be stand alone without the need for a steel skin. You might be able to have the building engineered so you can hang your bridge crane from the walls depending on how much you want to lift with it of course.

[Bentiron1946]

Out here in Southern Arizona for awhile there was a lot of talk about and some stuff was built but it was kinda expensive. My neighbor is a general contractor he built a few houses and a couple of businesses out using it. The thing was you had a fairly normal outside wall then you had to build another one just like it on the inside of the bails. If you wanted say a 3,200 SF house you ended up with the width of the hay bales all around added to foot print of the house under the roof and the way the county assesses tax is based on what is under the roof so the folks with these house had to go and argue for a tax adjustment, sometimes they got it and sometimes not. One house had a terrible termite problem in the straw and after three years the owners had him come back in and take it out and put in batt insulation, cost them a bunch of money but they only lived here in the winter, so he had all summer to do the work. The businesses he did were office and attached cooled warehouse for items that could not be stored above 85F so for them it paid off to keep their stuff air conditioned. There is a charter school near me that has straw bale insulation and I have heard that the class rooms are nice and quiet from near by traffic on a major road.

[lupiphile]

        Hey, thanks for all the lengthy insightful responses.

Mr. Stevens, Yup, I kinda suspected that something so quick,easy and cheap as metal siding wouldn't work with the vanguard of hippy engineering. Wierdly lime plastering/mortar repair is an ex-hobby of mine, so I fully understand how labor intensive it is, thats why I was hoping to come up with some thing a little faster. I've built a stucco sprayer that works with lime based render, but man alive, I work by myself  , and the idea of having to plaster 4000ft sq is a little overwhelming. Same goes for the other suggestions (adobe, concrete in forms) and oddly, clean dirt( you know, dirt, sans bricks, broken block, needles, bleach bottles, potato chip bags, and lead paint) is both expensive and hard to find. If I could just plaster the interior, I would be set.(after a few hundred hours, of course) 

 

           As for zoning, and other litigious encumberences, Here in philadelphia, and especially in my neighborhood, it's always better ask for forgiveness, than permission. I have no street frontage at all (just a 100ft 8.5 ft wide drive way) and my property  came with 5 illegal structures to start with. Once that deed transferred, they all became legal, that's the power of the philadelphia grandfather clause. In fact my primary impetus for this project is the city's reassessment of my property, the're doing blanket reassessments and some keen witted bureaucrat switched the numeric values for my property, so now they charge me as if I have a 9780sq ft building on a 1300sq ft lot. I've written and called, and appealed, but to no avail. obviously that would be a skyscraper surrounded by 2 story row homes. So I figure if they contend I have more square feet than the comcast center the least I could do is meet them half way. My property is also why anything like concrete is really hard, I can't get a concrete truck anywhere near  my shop, so I'd have to carry my dumping hopper on my forklift full of concrete to do anything major. Hence my Idea of a metal building with straw bale infill. I could just make post footers and do rubble trench under the non load bearing bale portion, with maybe a knee wall made from gravel filled tires as a capillary break, hell tires in architecture is practically vernacular building in philly. It's WAY easier to get tires, than clean dirt.

 

                 As to the sound deadening qualities of straw bale. I can't speak directly from experience on this, but i can on the subject of mass, specifically masonry mass and sound isolation. If you want to play your guitar through your 500w marshall stack at 3 am, a brick building is what you want. If you, say, want to run your 250lb power hammer at 3am, it's kind of the opposite of what you want. Have you ever put your ear against a hardwood table and had somebody rap their knuckles on the other end? thats my issue. In my experience nothing transmits vibration like a cementious material, where as my gut reaction is that straw bale is pretty much the other end of the spectrum.

 

             On to costs. In pricing bales I've found them to be slightly less than the insulation I was looking at for a metal building of this size and far more insular. Granted I'm under no illusions as to the work that would be associated with them( I god, woodrow!) specifically the plastering, but the cost is doable.

 

             As to structure, I plan to build a hella- stout freestanding metal frame and use straw bales as non-structural infill. there should be no issues with engineers after the fact.

 

            Mr.Kehler, I'd love  to hear some insights, and specifics about your shop. How long did it take to put up? Did you plaster both inside and out? Do you have some kind of structural frame, aside from the straw bale? what kind of roof structure did you provide, and what type of roof insulation? Are there pictures you could post?  

              Thanks again, all of you, Take care, Matt

[Charles R. Stevens]

Wouldn't the used tire turned gambion baskit work as a wall? The "Earth ships" built in New Mexico used tires filed with famed earth, then stuccoed. If you use steel columns, then just I file with tire filled with gravel on a rubble trench. Have a roofing contractor spray it with fome and then stuckoe it. The loos gravel should give you the sound abatement. I would suggest using the big ties on the bottom, and the small ones on top ;-)
Just thinking, still a lot of labor, and you have to cover it for fire protection.

[Jim Kehler]

You can call me Jim :) The shop is a post and beam structure from spruce and tamarack that was done by  a timberframer friend of mine. It sits on a concrete slab 5" floor with a 16" thickedge. It has regular truss rafters with blown cellulose in the attic. The roof is metal and the ceiling is metal as well. I put the bales up myself and stuccoed it inside and out. The bales took a fair bit of time but the most time was spent on the stucco (almost wrecked my shoulder by the end of it). I'm attaching two progress photos and one interior shot that is fairly recent.

[EGreen]

7 to 8 bucks a bale around here. feller would go broke quick. mice would be a problem also because of all the grain. also seems like rot
would be a factor from the hay pulling the moisture from the floor and plaster. then you would have the odor from the rot and mildew.
once the moisture is there you would have a heat build up and possible spontaneous combustion. just my thoughts

[lupiphile]

Mr. Stevens, your right I could make a tire wall and stucco it but that would be almost as much work as adobe and would contribute no insular properties to the project. That much mass is a wonderful capacitor, but we don't really have the daily tempature  swings that make that kind of building make sense in places like new mexico. But I've thought long and hard on the subject mostly on account of the preponderance of the xxxx things in the city.

Jim, thanks abunch for the pictures. That shop of yours is a real looker. Where in manitoba did you find the trees for such a substantial timber frame? I thought all you all had was prairie flowers?How long did all the plastering take? That place of yours is truly an inspiration.  How do you heat? Is there anything you would've done differently?  

EGreen, straw bales that I'd been quoted were 1.50 each but I was planning to buy over 1000 bales at a time, maybe that has something to do with it? It seems like in nebraska you'd be positively awash with the things? As to rot, staw bales are more or less an established infill system these days. Structural straw bale is still a little iffy, but rot really only seems to occur with a roof leek situation and there are a few examples of straw bale homes that are over 50 years old in climates as harsh as nebraska's with no rot issues. 

Thanks again for all your responses, Take care, Matt

[Charles R. Stevens]

I think Nebraska Started the straw bale thing. It was either that or sod out their. As of 20 years ago their where straw bale houses over a 100 years old still standing.
The trick with bales is to get them off the ground. A lot of things have ben used to do that, encapulation is the answer to rodent/ insect problems. Lastly under all costs protect the walls from water. No moisture, no rot, no termites and no ants.
As insurance a solution of borax and boric acid are often sprayed on the bales

[EGreen]

they used to be cheap here in north east Okla. but they are sure high now. bought some 2 weeks ago for my garden. 2 bales little better than 16 bucks. having been around various slabs and foundations is why I posted about rot. cement will absorb and hold moisture. straw will rot. this is a high humidity area so I am just not sure it would work here. this is just my opinion on this. not here to light a fuse

[Charles R. Stevens]

Descusion wouldn't light a fuse, it should lubricate the thinking gears.
The use of wood shavings for bedding, and the use of short stemed weat has let to farmers just leaving the straw on the ground. Raising the price for erosion control, gardening or crazy new wave building.
If you can keep its feet dry with a damp corse of some kind, and put a good hat over it it holds up real well. The usual recommendation for slab on grade is to raise the bails 4 to 8 inches above the flore, that way when the plumming breaks the bale wall doesn't get wet. I've seen that done either with foam insulation on the slab, or block insulated with foam, It should work here in Oklahoma. it has worked in Australia, Georgia, nebraska, arizona, newmexico...To name a few places. Acualy have less problems because of the earth scratchcoat and lime plaster than with convininal construction as condinsation is less of an issue.
I'd recomend the use of a rap around porch in oklihoma. To keep rain from blowing in and eroding the plaster of the walls.
That said, their have been fantastic failes to, not installing a damp corse, not protecting the top of the wall from water infiltration from a roof leak, water line leaks (run lines under the wall or threw conduit) misuse if stucco and vapors barriers. Not taking settling in to acount for structural bale walls....
The big hitch is labor costs, and the way contractors bid on things. Standard bidding based on square footage will screw you on any "alternitive" construction method. As will "contractor shortcuts"
For the DIY croud it's not a bad material.

[Charles R. Stevens]

As for another alternitive insulation that may work for the original question, is either papercreat or straw/slip infill. Both should be able to aplied directly to the inside of a steel building.

[Jim Kehler]

Thanks for the compliment, I love working in my shop.

We are close to the transition from boreal forest to prairie so there is lots of bush east of us.

I'm not sure how long the plastering took, maybe a month, too long anyways.

The only thing I might have done different would be to have budgeted for more hired help so that I didn't do so much by myself.

I heat with a small woodstove.

I paid 1.50 a bale and used about 900 bales.

[Clif]

Matt,

 

I doesn't come much wetter or mousier than here in the English fens.  7 years ago a local built a straw bale house and it still stands.  I copied a link to it but not sure if you will be able to get anything off it. British tv is set up differently than us tv.  I ran in the the guy a coulple of years ago and he was very happy with it.  As you in PA then getting straw and at a reasonable price isn't hard but you may have to wait until end of the summer when everyone is baling.  The program suggests getting the bales fresh and keeping them well protected until installed.  good wire to keep out the mice is a must too.  as to the outside, i suggest ship lap boards and do the lime wash inside where you can take your time.  Hope the link works and good luck.  clif

 

www.channel4.com/programmes/grand-designs/episode...6/episode-11‎

[Alan Evans]

       As to the sound deadening qualities of straw bale. I can't speak directly from experience on this, but i can on the subject of mass, specifically masonry mass and sound isolation. If you want to play your guitar through your 500w marshall stack at 3 am, a brick building is what you want. If you, say, want to run your 250lb power hammer at 3am, it's kind of the opposite of what you want. Have you ever put your ear against a hardwood table and had somebody rap their knuckles on the other end? thats my issue. In my experience nothing transmits vibration like a cementious material, where as my gut reaction is that straw bale is pretty much the other end of the spectrum.

 

I built my forge in a village and used mass for sound attenuation. The key to vibration transmission reduction is isolation of the hammer inertia blocks with an air gap from the floor and walls. Otherwise the structure is just a cubic sounding board. I used concrete block cavity walls with a 100mm (4") gap back filled with rockwool fibre insulation. The ceiling had two layers of plaster board and a acoustic wool board above with fibre cement sheets above an air gap above that.

 

After vibration transmission comes the air born noise and the clue is in the phrase...sound can only get out if the air can. Because we blacksmiths work with furnaces and fires (my big gas furnace is outside and we carry the bars in closing the door when forging) being air tight is a bit of a problem. I use a positive pressure ventilation fan and have a skylight. Passive ridge ventilation units would have been better, my brother in law had those installed in his service garage. Sound doesn't tend to come down, (think jet engine test beds) so if you can exhaust it up a chimney your neighbours will hear it less in normal atmospheric conditions.

 

My new shop I have already built the crane frame and insulated roof. The walls are probably going to be Durisol blocks. These are a clever cement  bound "fossilised wood" and fibre insulation interlocking block which is dry stacked almost like Lego blocks and forms shuttering into which you put rebar and pour concrete which forms a "waffle" of structural and thermal mass inside the insulation layer.

 

I did consider straw bale infill for it and have not given up on it entirely. I found an air powered stucco gun with a big hopper which I thought would be good for the render, I would like to see what system you devised. I met a blacksmith in Provence at their conference last year who is building a beautiful mansion with timber frame and straw bale, Claude Duteil who works with Amnon Erlichman who used to be Uri Hofi's foreman. I am not sure whether his forge will be in straw bale but he would be worth contacting for insights and possible problem avoidance. PM me for his email address if you would like it.

 

I remember being part of a conversation with Bill Gichner and Tom Joyce. Bill advised Tom to build his bridge crane frame posts outside his adobe forge and run the rails through the walls...easier to make foundations outside and would not impact on the internal space. 

 

Hope something in this ramble helps, Alan

[ThomasPowers]

Our vicar built his own straw bale house; done old school using bamboo rods through the bales and a traditional lime covering.

 

Says that rebar rods tend to condense moisture and promote rot and they coating needs to breathe.  (several large adobe structures that had been around for 200 years or so recently were found to be critically unstable due to the modern concrete stuccos allowing moisture build up inside the walls.  The catholic church in Lemitar NM collapsed!  New and improved is not always a good idea!

[BIGGUNDOCTOR]

I am using 55 gallon drums for my smithy walls

[lupiphile]

What an incredible amount of useful info, So much to respond to.... 

Mr. Stevens, A boric acid wash sure sound like a good idea, It probably would've occured to me right as the last of the plaster was being trowled on. A wrap around porch is something I dream about(being from the south) but unfortunately can't fit in my lot, or rather I can't justify the sacrifice of shop square footage. As to rising damp, I'm pretty sure I'm going to build a one foot knee wall out of tires and stone fill as a capillary break. Then plaster over the whole thing. sound good right?

Jim, You got all that plastering done in a month?! that's xxxx fast in my book, what with all that detail work on the interior walls and everything, were you working by yourself? Incredible.

Cliff, Yea I was pretty much thinking the same thing, from my experiences in england I'd say the sun never shined on the british empire, or rather an empire was created just to be able to live somewhere sunny and enjoy a good cup of tea at the same time. If you all can get away with straw bale anybody can. the video link unfortunately didn't work, something about a licencing issue. Thanks for trying.

Alan, I god, man someone should publish a book of your letters. Where you born this helpful or is it like a skin condition that develops with time? If I ever get to the part of england you dwell in I will corner you long enough to heartily shake your hand. It's good to hear your building a new shop. One of my favorite articles in the history of blacksmithing magazines is the " He who dares, wins/ goes broke" that you published in baba. That scale of work in that size shop is one impressive feat. Also cause for me to bite my tongue, hard, when ever I would start to complain about lack of space.

Enough of this glad-handing, on to the questions.

 

Ok I get the benefit of the inertia blocks, but how do you go about creating an air buffer between it and the floor? When I build my extension I plan on moving my forging area onto dirt, so maybe that question is irrelevant, but I would be curious to know what others have done.

Block with lots of rockwool makes sense, but is far out of reach of my buget, I like the acoustic wool for the ceiling, I was thinking of using something like that, fiberglass batt and a air gap for my roof. How do you deal with the skylight and sound?

I like that you reference jet engine test beds like its something we all had experience with back in grade school. that's pretty funny. Do you have problems wasting heat with a positive displacement fan, and/or do passive ridge vents provide enough fresh air in a closed shop? Actually, what is a positive displacement fan, as opposed to a regular ventilation fan? and I can't really think of ridge vents that wouldn't send sound sideways, though I'm probably missing something.

 I totally can't envision building crane infrastructure outside of walls that thick, how would the crane ride on its supports, without the supports being cantilevered the distance of the thickness of the wall?

 A blacksmith building a mansion? I live in the wrong country.

As to my stucco gun, it's modeled after a commercially made model just simplified, somebody came up with it long before me and I've made a few of them modifying it slightly each time, I wish I could remember the original website but alas I built my first one like 7 years ago and haven't referenced it since. I've used the tirrolessa sprayers and though they are a hair faster, the're just too xxxx heavy for my liking, I have a torn rotator cuff and holding 40 lbs( 2.857 stone ) on the end of a stick is murder on my shoulder. I sound like an old man( only thirty) I'll try to get a picture up. As that I don't have a super phone like every other person and their dog, does these days , loading picture means pulling them off my camera and sending them through 2 different programs to resize them, resave them and upload them, but I'll get around to it in the next day or two. I promise you will be underwhelmed.

 

Thanks for everything, Matt 

[Alan Evans]

Constructing the air gap depends where you start from. My 3cwt is sitting on a 12 cubic metres inertia block which is 3 or 4 times the manufacturers recommendation. 3 x 3 x 1.5 metres (10' x10' x 5'). I cast that before the floor by digging that sized hole and shuttering the top ring to bring it flush with my intended floor height. I then spaced off the shuttering for the floor leaving a 75mm (3") gap which had ledges at the top to receive a drop in cover plate.

 

For the 50kg Reiter and the 1cwt Alldays I was not sure exactly where they were going to sit initially, so I cast the floor slab in one go at 150mm (6") thick. When I had chosen the place for the hammers, they were both mounted on inertia blocks/plates on Ø150mm (Ø6") rubber buffers, I cut through the floor slab with a diamond saw and took out a 50mm (2") strip all around them. Then I cut a ledge with a diamond blade in the angle grinder to take a 6mm (1/4") cover plate.

 

Manfred Bredohl had a very elaborate system for his big Becher hammer. He dug a huge hole which was floored and walled I think in one continuous pour. Looked almost like a swimming pool. Then an independent block about the size of my inertia block was set on a series of coil springs inside that. There was sufficient space for a ladder and inspection walkway all around the block, plus lighting and a pumping system to get any water out if I remember correctly.

 

If you are on an earth floor as long as the back of your block doesn't come in contact with your wall footing you should be fine. The engineer that looked at my system said that the thump would go down and out at around 45º from my block so should not worry the neighbours. I am on Cotswold Brash rather than slab rock here.

 

Jet engine test bed? I suppose I could have said "Google" instead of "think"!

 

The skylight vents the heat and the window swings open to vertical so the noise goes up.

 

The positive pressure ventilation inlet is at ground level and comes up through a baffled (for sound) flue inside the blockwork chimney breast that is up the outside of the forge, the fan blows air into the forge and it finds its own way out through the imperfect air tightness of the building, the skylight, the hearth chimney or any open door.

 

I set it up that way because I read that the fire brigade use a big fan which blows clean air into a building as the quickest most efficient way to clear it of smoke. If the fan runs at so many cubic metres a minute you can be sure that all of them are moving clean air in. If you suck out at the same rate you may be sucking out some clean air along with the smoke, logical really. 

 

I think Bill's idea for the bridge crane was to put the posts up outside the building and run the rails through the walls. The bridge/traveller could obviously only travel on the rail section that was inside the building; the rails would only have to extend through the wall and a foot or so beyond to the posts.

 

Thank you for your kind words. As to your astute analysis of the cause of the British Empire it is hoped that the invention of Goretex, thermal underwear and central heating will have moderated the belligerent national attitude of the British and their search for warmth at the expense of others! It is probably a sign of my guilt for our history that I feel I must make amends by sharing my experiences with you ex colonial cousins! 

 

As long as you are not going to shake me warmly by the throat for the sins of my forebears you are welcome to visit, but I am afraid I don't follow the national habit of tea and only drink coffee.

 

Alan

[Candidquality]

Followed straw bale constrution for a while, but never built any myself.   Something just recently approved should give you solid ground to stand on with buillding inspectors. http://www.strawbale.com/irc-code-2013/  pdf file on the page with the added appendix for straw bale building. It will be expanded next year.  The rest of the site should give you enough information to get where you are going.  Attached pdf below to make it easier.

 

Some good information here, one thing I noted though was someone mentioned spraying with borax for pest resistance.  This is actually a fire preventative measure.   One of the oldest(that I know of) methods to reduce the flammibility of a wooden shop was to spray down with go ol 20 mule team borax.  A better preventative for bugs would be diatomacious earth(natural, not the stuff from the pool suppply that is heated).  Will last forever if kept dry,  and inside a straw bale wall is a perfect place for it.  no bugs, means nothing larger there feeding on bugs. 

 

just my  .02

[DSW]

        My property is also why anything like concrete is really hard, I can't get a concrete truck anywhere near  my shop, so I'd have to carry my dumping hopper on my forklift full of concrete to do anything major. Hence my Idea of a metal building with straw bale infill. I could just make post footers and do rubble trench under the non load bearing bale portion, with maybe a knee wall made from gravel filled tires as a capillary break, hell tires in architecture is practically vernacular building in philly. It's WAY easier to get tires, than clean dirt.

 

 

 

Matt to deal with the concrete problem, you might need to look into having it pumped. Granted you pay to have that done, but concrete can be pumped quite a distance. Down side is that you end up with a fair amount of "waste" that has to be dealt with when they prime and clean the pump. Many times on a job they save small jobs for that "waste" crete like side walk blocks. Amount of waste depends on the pump used, but 1/2 a yard is pretty common for full size pump trucks.

 

We've pumped concrete over buildings when access was limited in the back of the property using a pump truck, and pumped concrete thru buildings using a trailer pump when we needed to fill areas in a basement of a commercial building. Cost of the pump is offset by the labor savings.

 

 

As far as sound, from what I learned when I took my acoustics/HVAC class years ago, mass is the major thing used to deaden sound. Next up is to separate the materials. That's why often in commercial sound studios they use leaded drywall and double walls to absorb sound and reduce vibration transmission.