As a comparison to the office nose graphs I posted last week, at the weekend I set up my noise meter in my study at home and created the same graphs for that location. Like the previous graph, this shows a time when I was largely sitting working in a private room. As it was another warm day, the window was open, but there was very little noise from outside - no one nearby was cutting hedges or anything like that. The underlying ambient noise level (green lines) is similar at about 42dB, but the average sound levels and noise variation at home are dramatically lower.
Ideally it would be possible to get the noise generated by my own activities isolated, as that would give a clearer indication of the underlying disturbance noise. In the home standard deviation line (red) in the middle there is a two hour period when I was out, which is clearly visible, suggesting that most of the other sound variation came from my activities. In the work standard deviation line, the last two hours are also showing time when my office was empty, but clearly not as disturbance free.
We're due to be moved into a large open-plan office soon, and when that happens I'll try and run the tests again.