CEL-490 Integrating Octave Band Digital Sound Level Meter

Visitors to the £100million Eden project in Cornwall, the staff who work there and the people living nearby are all benefiting from state of the art noise measurement technology from Casella CEL.

The project’s Technical Services Team has taken delivery of a CEL-490 sound monitor – and trained its Environmental Monitoring Technician Steve Nicholls in its use - to undertake monitoring in a variety of locations where excessive noise has been, or could be, a problem.

The equipment has been successfully used in the ticketing hall where the noise created by the sheer volume of visitors, together with sounds from various exhibits within the acoustically-poor building, have been identified, resulting in the effective positioning of acoustic screens.

As the Project has progressed from its horticultural and botanical beginnings to a greatly enhanced facility catering for widely differing events, the CEL 490 has demonstrated its versatility. It has recently confirmed that noise levels produced by pop and rockconcerts held in the “Pit” open air arena are not intrusive to residents living less than 500 metres away, while in the coming months the instrument will be used to ensure that sculpting work on a 100-ton piece of Cornish granite that is to form the centrepiece on a new educational resource centre will remain within acceptable acoustic levels.

Steve Nicholls comments: “Having carried out a cost benefit analysis that concluded that the purchase of the equipment and the subsequent training would be financially more prudent than ongoing employment of acoustics consultants, we have been making more and more use of the CEL-490.”