Many houses keep their hardest-working machines downstairs. The dehumidifier that fights the damp, the chest freezer full of bulk buys, the water heater, the washer and dryer: all of them run for hours, often at night, and often under the rooms where people sleep. Nobody sits beside them, so nobody thinks of them as noisy, until the floor above starts to hum.
And basements rarely stay storage. They become a guest room, a home office, a gym. Then the same machines have a second audience in the same room, not just through the ceiling. Below are our guides to each of those machines, read from the point of view of the basement, with the setting behind every figure we quote.
Two ways sound leaves a basement
A basement machine reaches you by two routes, and only one of them has a number.
The first is through the air. A fan, a compressor or a pump makes sound that spreads around the room, up the stairwell and through any open door. The dBA figures on spec sheets describe this part, near the machine, at a distance the maker almost never states.
The second is through the structure. A compressor or a spinning drum shakes whatever it stands on, and joists carry that shaking into the rooms above as a hum or a thump. No maker in any of the guides below publishes a figure for it. That is why the manuals spend so many words on level feet, firm floors and clearances, and why placement often matters more than the model.
For scale, the National Park Service says an increase of 10 dB causes a doubling of perceived loudness. So a gap of a decibel or two between brands on a spec sheet can vanish once a floor is in the way, while a machine moved from under the bedroom to the far corner can change a great deal.
The dehumidifier: the machine that never stops
In most basements, the dehumidifier runs more hours than anything else. Our guide to the quietest dehumidifiers for a basement starts from capacity and drainage, then compares figures speed for speed. The GE APYR50LC lists 47 dBA on low and 50 dBA at maximum, with a pump rated to lift water 16 feet. The Frigidaire FHDP5033Y1 lists 49 dBA on low and 51.5 on high, and ENERGY STAR lists it at 49.95 pints a day under the cool, basement-style test. If a floor drain sits beside the unit, the GE ADYR35LC lists 46 dBA on low.
Three points from that guide matter most for the room above.
- Pick the fan speed yourself. GE's manual says Smart Dry adjusts the fan speed automatically, which in a damp basement can mean high. Danby's Dryer mode runs the fan on high. Low, chosen by hand, is the figure that describes your night.
- Expect cycling in a cold basement. ENERGY STAR warns that frost can form on the coils below 65 degrees and make the compressor cycle on and off repeatedly. Each restart is a change in sound, and a change is easier to notice than a steady hum.
- Stand it on the slab, away from the bedroom. Concrete beats a wooden platform, and a few feet toward the laundry corner can matter more than 2 dBA.
A finished basement office or guest room that is only slightly damp may need much less. The GE ADYR22LC lists 43 dBA on low and 45 dBA at maximum, the lowest top-speed figure in that guide.
If the damp is in a crawl space rather than a full basement, or you want one ducted unit for the whole house, our guide to the quietest crawl space and whole-home dehumidifiers covers the class above portable units. It ranks each maker only against itself, because none states a measuring distance, and reads the manuals on ducting, vibration through the floor and drain pumps.
The freezer: quiet on paper, noisy when it touches a wall
ENERGY STAR's own advice points freezers downstairs: unless you live in a mild climate, keep your freezer indoors, such as in the basement. Our guide to the quietest chest and upright freezers found only four brands that publish a figure at all, and none that states how it was measured. The Hisense WFC050M6XWD lists 40 dB, the lowest chest figure, and the Midea MRU21F5BWW upright lists 39 dBA.
In a basement the more useful parts of that guide are the manuals. Hisense lists three causes of unusual noise: the cabinet is not level, the back is touching the wall, or containers have fallen or are rolling. On an uneven basement floor, levelling is the first job, and Element's largest chest, the ECF21MDCW, lists no levelling legs at all. Check the temperature rating too. Element rates its 7.0 cu ft chest from 50°F to 109.4°F, which suits a heated basement and not a cold one.
A manual defrost chest never makes the popping sound of an automatic defrost, which is one reason a chest can seem quieter in a quiet room.
The heat pump water heater: a compressor on a tank
A heat pump water heater bolts a compressor and a fan onto the tank, which is why its makers publish noise figures at all. It also wants to live somewhere like a basement. ENERGY STAR says these heaters should be installed in interior spaces that remain between 40° to 90° F year-round, with 1,000 cubic feet of air space around the water heater, and suggests a space with excess heat, such as a furnace room. It adds that during hot humid times of the year the water heater can help cool and dehumidify the space it is installed in.
Our guide to the quietest heat pump water heaters found the rare category where makers argue about decibels in public. GE Profile's GeoSpring says it can "operate as low as 41 dBA", per a named test specification, and that is the floor of a variable speed compressor. Rheem's ProTerra 50 claims 45 dBA "measured at 6.28 feet using third-party certified testing procedures". AO Smith's Voltex AL states 45 dBA with no condition at all.
Two findings matter if the tank shares a wall with a finished room. Rheem's own 120V dedicated circuit plug-in prints "55" dBA, ten above its 240V claim, so the plug-in convenience has an acoustic cost by the maker's own table. And Stiebel Eltron publishes both a sound power figure and a sound pressure figure at 1 meter, which are different quantities from the others' bare dBA and cannot be ranked against them. Our explainer on sound power vs sound pressure covers why.
The laundry corner: spin and shaking
A washer is quiet for most of its cycle and loud for a few minutes at the end. Our guide to the quietest washing machines shows it with the only brand that publishes both halves: Bosch lists 52 dBA washing and 72 dBA spinning for the 300 Series WGA12400UC, and 51 dBA washing and 75 dBA spinning for the faster-spinning 500 Series. Speed Queen's TR7 says 43dB during agitation, which describes washing, not the spin.
For a top loader, our guide to the quietest top load washers adds Midea, which lists 64 dBA washing and 77 dBA spinning for the MLTW37A1BWW, the only top loader it found with both halves published.
The spin is the part that reaches the floor above, as much through the structure as through the air. A basement can be a kind place for a washer, because the manuals favour concrete: LG says concrete is best, and Miele says concrete is far less prone to vibration during the spin than wooden floorboards. What undoes that advantage is the installation. LG says failure to remove the shipping bolts may cause severe vibration and noise, and never to install the washer on a platform or weakly supported structure. Level the feet, tighten the lock nuts, and if your washer lets you choose a lower spin speed, the lower one is the quieter one.
The dryer has thinner data. Our guide to the quietest clothes dryers found that every dryer with a maker figure is a 24 inch compact, from Bosch's "Silence level 62 dBA" on its heat pump models to 67, and that no full size dryer publishes a number. For a basement with no easy route to an outside wall, a heat pump dryer needs no vent, though it adds a compressor hum a vented dryer lacks. Read the dryer figures only against each other: no dryer maker names the quantity, and the Beko group declares sound power on its EU labels, so setting a dryer figure beside a washer's spin figure would mix two kinds of number.
When the basement becomes a room
A bedroom. The World Health Organization's community noise guidelines recommend less than 30 dB(A) in bedrooms during the night. That describes the whole room, with everything in it running at once, so use it as a target for the room, not a line to hold a spec sheet against. In a basement bedroom the utility corner is effectively part of the room, so the placement rules above apply twice: to the rooms upstairs, and to the bed. Close the door between them, choose low speeds by hand, and put the dehumidifier and freezer as far from the bed as the space allows. For the machines you might add to that room, from purifiers to fans, see our page on setting up a quiet bedroom.
An office. An office is used by day, when more of the basement's machines may be running, as the last section explains. A small dehumidifier on low, like the 22-pint GE above, and a door between the desk and the utility room are the simplest steps.
A gym. A basement flips the treadmill problem. Our guide to the quietest treadmills for an apartment reports that footstrike impact, not motor hum, is the noise that travels, and quotes NordicTrack saying a concrete slab building transmits very little vibration between floors. A slab underfoot is the good case. But a slab also reflects sound: Peloton says a hardwood or concrete floor can create more reverberation and noise than a carpeted floor or a heavy rubber mat. So the dense mat still earns its place, and NordicTrack says it should extend beyond the machine on every side. NordicTrack also notes that walking involves significantly less footstrike force than running, and the one treadmill figure in a specification table, LifeSpan's under 60 dB for the TR1200Pro, belongs to a walking machine. The rule from the dehumidifier section holds for a treadmill as well: if the basement gives you a choice, do not set it up under a bedroom.
What to listen for
Two basement machines have no guide here: the sump pump and the furnace. We quote no figures for either. What our dehumidifier guide notes is the pattern: during the day a furnace, a water heater, a washer or a sump pump may run near the dehumidifier and mask it, and at night those stop. So the sounds that wake the house are usually the ones that start and stop: a compressor restarting after defrost, a spin at the end of a delayed wash, a pump kicking in. When you choose where things go, think about which of them runs at night, and put the most distance between those and the bedroom.
Before setting any two figures on this page against each other across brands, read why you cannot compare dB ratings across brands.
We did not measure any of these products. Every figure in our guides is the maker's own, quoted with the setting it describes.