this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2026
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I am like 99% sure you are wrong but I'll eat my words if you can show me a country's building codes that say concrete/brick/whatever is required between homes with shared walls.
I think every country has both.
I believe that in my country shared walls need to be at least REI60 rated (DIN EN 13501-2). REI60 means the load bearing, integrity and thermal resistance hold up for at least 60 minutes during a fire. This almost always means brick walls. I think even if your house is within x amount of meters from another house it also needs to be REI60.
It may almost always mean brick walls but all of that can be accomplished with wood framing as well.
Lots of apartments have thin walls, houses not so much. But yeah we mostly don't buy guns here.
https://e-construction.gov.ua/laws_detail/3083626778627933844?doc_type=2
It doesn't have a strict "X mm" norms but reglaments a noice propagation. Of course it would take some calculation to translate it into millimeters of brick or concrete, but obviously ultra-thin bullet-penetrable walls won't fit into this standard.
I'll trust your translation but now I will ask that you trust that I'm an AV engineer because I don't want to actually do the math.
A concrete or brick wall would have to be twice as thick as a properly-treated wood frame wall for the same acoustic isolation. It would cost 2-3x as much, too, not included drilling for conduit/wires.
Yes. It would cost a few times more. And it will stand for x100 times longer. And it has good thermal insulation. And a bullet insulation too :)
Ok, you must be trolling because concrete and brick have TERRIBLE thermal resistance. The same acoustic materials used in a wood wall give it like 20x the insulation.
And if you are not trolling, you should learn more about a subject before speaking on it next time. The claims you are making aren't true
That is the most stupid thought I heard on Internet for the whole week.
They're not wrong though. You might be thinking thermal resistance as in "can hold a blowtorch to it" in which case sure, bricks might win, but that's not the context here.
R-value measures how quickly heat transfers from one side of an object to the other, a higher number means it insulates better, or resists thermal transfer.
A 4" brick has an R value under one. It's like 0.8 or so. 1" thick plywood is already better at 1.25 or so. I think the OSB used as sheathing on the outside of wood frame houses is higher still but could be wrong there. Bricks objectively have worse numbers here
Yeah, for good termal resistance with brick you need double walls with a gap in the middle (with air is good, with thermal insulating foam is better).
That said, I (in Europe) have never seen double walls used for internal walls.
PS: Actually I just remembered that in some places the kind of brick used is not solid but actually hollow - for example and one of the differences from this to the solid kind is exactly that these have better acoustic and thermal insulation.
No bricks and concrete have high thermal mass, but they have fairly high lamda values making them very poor insulators
Bricks: 0.84
Concrete (dense): 1.4
Hardwood timber: ~0.15
Woodfibre board: 0.11
Plasterboard: 0.16
source
Wood and plasterboard is still a poor insulator compared to actual insulation materials (they're around 0.035-0.038, with exception of PIR), but still much better than both brick and solid concrete.
Would you mind checking the R value of brick for me? And while you're at it, check what an insulated wood wall's is?
Brick and concrete have high thermal MASS, not resistance.
Again, please learn more about a subject before you speak so confidently on it. You could have looked it up real quick before posting
Bricks do have terrible thermal insulation. You are probably confusing thermal mass for thermal insulation.
I think that depends on whether it's solid brick or this kind of brick.
Were I live (Portugal) houses tend to be made from the latter kind of brick.
That said, even the latter kind of brick doesn't provide as good insulation as double walls, either air gapped or (even better) with insulating foam in between, and I've only ever seen that used for external walls, mainly in colder (further to the North) countries in Europe.
What materials are preferred heavily depends on the local climate, too! Those bricks probably work great for the sweet spot Portugal is in for weather. They'd be very bad up here in the Midwest US, thermal mass works against you when it's below freezing out.
I've done a lot of what probably sounds like brick slander here but I'm not a hater, my dream home would have a brick exterior with a wood frame interior. I've just worked in a construction-adjacent industry for a long time and wanted to dispel the misinformation this guy is peddling
Noise insulation can easily be done without brick/concrete. In fact the normal way is without brick/concrete. These two things are not the same at all.