Compliance procedures for sound insulation between dwellings in new housing – Rules according to Danish regulations & Experiences from practice

National building regulations have existed in Denmark since 1961 and have included acoustic regulations for housing. The housing stock in Denmark consists currently (2023) of almost 2.8 mio dwellings, of these are ~40% dwellings in multi-storey (MS) housing, ~40% one-family houses and ~15% terraced houses (row houses). This paper focuses on compliance with limits for airborne and impact sound insulation between dwellings in new-build and apply to both MS housing and terraced houses (row houses).
Issuing of building permits and permits allowing use of buildings after completion are administered by local building authorities in the municipalities, and for decades they were involved in technical details related to the building permits. However, administration of building regulations and proof of compliance changed over time – with some of the changes unfortunately implying reduced options for check of compliance. In practice, compliance with acoustic regulations suffers from various shortcomings in the building process, some related to the builders’ lack of understanding of acoustic regulations or lack of inspection of the construction work, others due to lack of compliance test or building authorities’ lack of expertise with how to check the validity/invalidity of field test reports. The consideration behind the building regulations' requirement for documentation is partly to ensure that buildings comply with the requirements, and partly to ensure that later users of the building have a valid documentation basis. The paper describes details of the shortcomings and provides examples of severe construction defects being noticed mainly due to field tests following user complaints. Furthermore, indications of options for improvement of documentation procedures will be described.