Hey all – just posted an article on Forbes all about loud sex. That survey was also used to create the new Noisy Neighbors calculator.
Very few survey respondents actually would offer to pay cash to a roommate based on disrupting them. It’s a more of a guide to the value of the appropriate gift for, or to how much value your apartment would lose on the open market if you knew how frequent the disturbances would be.
The way we calculate the number comes from linearly extrapolating loud sex to all other cases. Specifically, loud sex is worth (per incident) some number we get an average of from our survey. We take this as a fraction of the average daily rent contribution of our survey respondents. Lastly, we linearly extrapolate this percentage from the average badness of each sound type in the “how disruptive question” described in this article.
Make sure you use your personal rent contribution instead of the total rent for the apartment, or the number will be several times too high!
If you have questions about the procedure, feel free to use our contact form and I will respond as soon as I can (often well within 24 hours).
The Splitwise Blog 