Our sheer descent does a good job making road noise - I would think a weeping wall wouldn't give good coverage - but a water fall should.

We have a residential street behind us, not real noisy. We have a 3' wide sheer descent and love it. You can change the flow and increase or decrease the sound of the waterfall. Best of luck. Barb

I love the sound our weeping wall makes, but I doubt it'd be enough to cover the sound of a freeway.

My dad's got a rather large (maybe 6 tons?) waterfall, and I personally think it's pleasant sounding, but too loud. But, it's in a very small backyard, surrounded by brick walls. You could vary the flow over a waterfall with valving to get the sound right.

The volume on sheer descents will vary -I'd think- with the height that they're mounted at. I'm not sure how variable the flow is through a sheer descent, but if you've got multiple descents installed, you could vary the number that is used; again through valving.

I think what you may have to do is try to work out a way to hear a couple of different options for yourself.

Waterfalls are beautiful and I'm sure would mask out the freeway sound, however as beautiful and pleasant sounding as they are, they can be out of budget for some. We have fan jets (sometimes called fountain jets) on our raised planter that make a nice "rain" sound. We also have a bubbler fountain in our sunshelf that can just bubble slightly or we can turn the valve for it to go 20 ft. in the air. Usually we keep it around 1 1/2' to 2' in height and sometimes it is difficult to hear our outdoor speakers with it going. Nice thing about this...it's inexpensive and you can control the feature and the level of sound output.

We don't have a freeway but I am less than a block from a grade school and there are TONS of children playing constantly (if you don't have children, playing=screaming at the top of their lungs).

We have a overflow from our spa (raised 18") to the pool and with that on there is plenty of white noice to block out the children and lawn warriors ;-) We do also have a bubbler but the only time I've turned it on was when we tested it.

Our spa spillover has a nice sound, but not enough to drown out the street noise or the shrieking kids in the pool next door. The waterfall does the trick. We keep it at about 50% flow rate, but can jack it up all the way. At 50% it blocks all the noise except teenagers with subwoofers in their cars.

Thanks for your thoughts on water features. Would a 3 ton waterfall be pretty loud? A bigger one might overwhelm our yard.

I've been in backyards that were right up against the 57 freeway with 12' high block walls and it was unbelieveabley noisy. I would check with Cal Trans and ask them how many decibles it would take to help reduce the noise.

There is something called an acoustifence It can be put onto any fence by homeowners to drown out sounds We are in process of building a pool and have been told the best to mask sound are the rock waterfalls But they start around 4K and that's for a very small 3x2 So they are out of our price range

I found the acoustifence and can't wait to see how well it works We have construction behind us daily and soon to have a new neighborhood So this along with the 3 foot sheer descent, 2 12 inch fan jets and one bubbler should be enough to mask sounds .....we hope

Good luck

skater23466 - I would sure love to hear what you think of the Acoustifence option! Hubbie and I are downsizing to a terrific little 15 year old house with cool landscaping and an in-ground pool with spa and a small water feature - but it was designed for water to flow 'gently' over rocks into the pool and is insufficient to mask road noise from two-lane road directly behind my back fence. I've been looking into the pricing, but haven't 'dropped the hammer' on that project yet as there are still others higher on the priority list... I'd love to hear your experience with the product if you did wind up installing it...

hi, one side of our property abuts highway 1 in mill valley, california. i put in a 9-foot-tall acoustifence all along that property line. here's what i've learned: 1. sound is like water in that it will find its way through/around a sound fence. since we only used acoustiblock for the fence on one side of the property, the sound simply comes in where the acoustiblock ends on either side. the sound also comes OVER the acoustiblock fence. fyi we have 8' high redwood fencing on the other three sides of the property. (wood is not recommended for noise control fyi.) 2. a sound fence is most effective if you put it around the item that is making the noise. sound fences are very effective, for example, when completely boxing in a freestanding air conditioner or pool pump. 3. the farther away you stand from our fence, the less effective the fence is. when i stand two feet from the fence i can tell that the traffic sounds are somewhat muffled -- less tinny sounding, maybe. but the difference is very subtle. when i stand any farther away i can't tell the difference at all. 4. effectiveness is not determined by the quality of noise-reducing material, it is determined by the situation -- all of the above things i've listed. i can't stress this enough. if i had it to do over again i would invest in some kind of water feature and put it close to our bedroom window. our whole house has double-paned windows but the noise still finds its way into the house -- especially when we have a window open at night, for example. i do hope this helps you. the man who i worked with at Acoustiblock was a very nice person, but i believe he should have told me to save my $$ and look for a different solution for our noise problem.

This is a great response @bigmoof. I am looking into installing water feature in our pool (as a wall). Any recommendations?