How to set up a quiet home office

A home office is rarely loud because of one machine. It is loud in small pieces: a computer fan that spins up during a video call, a drive that seeks, a printer that wakes, a heater humming under the desk. Each one is modest on its own. Together, a few feet from a microphone, they are what the other people on your call hear.

This page is the hub for our home office guides. It walks through what makes the noise, how each category's makers state it, and where to go for the details. We did not measure anything here. Every figure is the maker's own, quoted as published.

The yardstick: your own voice

There is no official noise target for a home office. The most useful reference is speech. The US National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders puts whispering at 30 dB, a humming refrigerator at 40 dB and normal conversation at 60 to 70 dBA. A machine near conversation level competes with your voice; one far below it fades behind it.

Two more points shape everything below. The National Park Service says an increase of 10 dB causes a doubling of perceived loudness, so small gaps in decibels matter more than they look. And OSHA notes that indoors, sound falls away more slowly than in open space, because it reflects off surfaces. A small room with a hard desk, bare walls and a window keeps more of each machine's noise than you might expect. For the room by room version, see how quiet is quiet enough.

Two kinds of number on the spec sheets

Before the machines, the units. Home office gear is where two different acoustic quantities meet, and mixing them is the most common mistake.

Sound power describes the machine itself, wherever you stand. Computer and printer makers declare it in bels, written B(A), where one bel is ten decibels. Apple declares the Mac mini at 1.3 B. Dell declares the OptiPlex Micro 7020 at 2.7 bels at idle.

Sound pressure describes what reaches a microphone at a stated position, in dB(A). Apple publishes 4 dB at the operator position for the Mac mini, and Dell publishes 15.4 dB at the operator position at idle.

The trap is reading one as the other. HP declares the LaserJet MFP M234dw at 6.6 B(A) of sound power and 51 dB(A) of sound pressure. The 6.6 is not a 66 you would hear. Canon writes sound power in decibels instead, "Active: 69.3 dB or less" for the MF275dw, which is 6.93 B. The row label tells you which quantity you are reading. The full explanation is in sound power vs sound pressure.

Heaters, fans, air conditioners, shredders and standing desks are different again: a dB or dBA figure, usually with no distance and often with no setting. Those figures compare products within a category, not across one. See dBA explained and why you cannot compare dB ratings across brands.

The computer

The computer runs all day, so its idle figure describes most of your working hours and its load figure describes the moments it works hard.

• The quietest desktop PCs ranks desktops and all in ones by their declared sound power under ISO 9296, keeps mean and upper limit conventions apart, and shows which makers declare a processor load mode as well as idle.
• The quietest mini PCs separates machines with declared figures under the standards from brands that measure in their own labs, and covers one fanless machine with no figure at all.
• The quietest laptops covers laptops with declared figures, from fanless MacBooks upward, again keeping the two sound power conventions apart.

If you build your own, the noise comes from the parts:

• The quietest PC cases ranks cases by the published ratings of the fans they ship with, since no case maker we read publishes a figure for the case itself.
• The quietest PC fans explains why every fan figure is a full speed, open air maximum, and why running a bigger fan slowly beats buying the lowest number.
• The quietest CPU coolers covers air, low profile and liquid coolers, and the few makers that publish figures at partial load.
• The quietest power supplies explains the Cybenetics letter grades most makers publish instead of decibels, and the one maker that publishes a figure at several loads.

Drives, NAS boxes and the UPS

These are the machines that run when nobody is using them, which makes idle the figure that matters.

• The quietest hard drives ranks drive families by maker idle and seek figures, and shows why one maker's data sheet and manual give the same drive in units that do not convert.
• The quietest NAS boxes covers enclosures, the one maker that publishes its test setup in detail, and why the drives in the bays decide most of what you hear.
• The quietest UPS battery backups covers the cooling fan, which some units run all the time and speed up under load or on battery, and how to silence the alarm that beeps during an outage.

A spinning drive in a NAS on the desk and the same NAS in a closet are different offices. Distance and a door do more than any spec sheet difference.

Printers and shredders

These run for minutes, not hours, but they are loud while they do.

• The quietest printers for a home office sorts printer figures into sound pressure, sound power and unlabelled dB, and ranks within each. Xerox publishes 53 dBA printing one-sided and 16 dBA in ready for the B230, at one metre. A printer in the same room spends most of the day in ready, so that figure describes more of your day than the printing one.
• The quietest paper shredders covers what shredder makers publish, why the one labelled condition is idle rather than shredding, and why run time matters as much as the figure.

For both, timing is the cheapest fix: print and shred when you are not on a call.

The desk, the fan and the room

• The quietest standing desks covers motor noise figures, which are nearly all ceilings with no condition attached, for a machine that moves for a few seconds at a time.
• The quietest desk fans covers which makers publish a figure for the speed you actually use. A desk fan sits within arm's reach of your microphone, so the speed you run it at on a call matters more than its lowest figure.
• The quietest space heaters for an office covers the few heater makers that publish a figure, fan against fanless heaters, and the practical rules on outlets and clearance from the manuals.
• The quietest portable air conditioners explains why most portable figures describe the lowest fan speed, and why a window unit is quieter on the makers' own figures when your window allows one.

Heating and cooling are the ones that can run for your whole working day, often close to your chair. Read the figure for the setting you will use, not the quietest one on the box.

How to use this page

1. List what runs all day. The computer, a NAS, a UPS fan, a heater or an air conditioner. Their idle or low setting figures matter most.
2. List what runs in bursts. The printer, the shredder, the desk motor. Schedule them away from calls.
3. Read the quantity before the number. Bels of sound power, dB(A) of sound pressure, or a bare dB. Compare like with like, within a category.
4. Mind the microphone. Whatever is closest to it, a desk fan or a computer on the desk, is what your call hears first.
5. Remember the room. Hard surfaces reflect sound, and no maker's figure accounts for yours.

We did not measure any of the products this page links to. Every figure is the maker's own, quoted as published.