Dryer drama

Working long hours, it was common for us to do washing of a weeknight and put on the dryer while going to sleep. But our downstairs neighbour seems to be an insomniac and likes to blame our dryer (among other things).

The most memorable disagreement was the first night that she buzzed us to complain about 10:50pm. I argued back and refused to turn it off until the clothes were dry.

This may seem unreasonable, but we’ve never heard any noise from any other apartment in 2 years. Also, we’d kindly let her in late one other night a few months earlier to search for a noise that was keeping her awake (not in our apartment).

Anyway, about 20 minutes later I felt guilty and the clothes were pretty much dry so I turned off the dryer.

Then at about 12:30am our apartment buzzer rang again, waking me up. Still annoyed, I answered the apartment buzzer with “What?!?”. “Ah, sir, it’s the police. Would you mind coming down?”. So, I was woken up by a noise complaint follow up from the police. To be honest, I’m not sure either the cops or I knew how to handle it.

I’d love to do a full noise level analysis to check that we’re definitely within the NSW noise guidelines, especially since dryers aren’t even listed as a potential problem source. But unfortunately, I don’t have access to a noise level meter.