Sound Advice: How to Quiet Your Blaring Blender

Modern blenders are incredibly powerful and able to reduce even the most frozen-solid fruits to super smooth smoothies in seconds. With all of that power comes ridiculous amounts of noise, though. That's not a huge concern if you live alone in a house, but if you live in an apartment building or a full household you may want to find ways to quiet your blender, especially if you like a smoothie early in the morning. After running repeated tests with some of the best high-power blenders on the market, we were ready to see what, if anything, could quiet them down.

We tried the most drastic idea first, which involved buying the Whisper Blend SE-2-VT sound enclosure. This is just one of a handful of acrylic covers on the market, some of which are designed to specifically fit certain blenders. The Whisper Blend that we tried fit almost all of the blenders in our lineup, even the really tall ones. There were a couple blenders with a wider base that didn't quite fit, though.

spend top dollar to get the blender with the most power and then spend again to quiet it down with a sound enclosure, the costs really start to add up. The sound enclosure did reduce the sound coming from even the loudest units in our blender reviews, but it was not a dramatic difference. The average reduction was 7.7decibels, which wasn't that noticeable. It's still loud – just not quite as loud.

Even though the Whisper Blend did not dramatically reduce sound, it was the most effective of everything we tried. There are a few other ideas for reducing sound that we tried as well, and all of them helped, at least a little.

Use a dish towel

Placing your blender on a folded dish towel and wrapping it in another dish towel can lessen the total amount of sound. This is a pretty common tactic and it did reduce sound output when we tried it, although not by that much. In our testing, sitting blenders on a folded dish towel reduced sound output by an average of 1 decibel.

Choose a blender with less power

Sacrificing overall watts and blending power is generally a bad idea, but there is no denying that the less powerful blenders are quieter, and some of them still do a decent job of blending fully frozen fruit and other tough stuff. If sound is a very high priority, it may be worth considering a more mellow blender as you make your buying decision.

Position it farther from the wall

One minor change can make at least a small difference. The amount of sound bouncing off of the walls seemed a bit lower when we moved the blenders a few inches away from the wall.

Make some things ahead of time

One of the best things about using a blender in food preparation is all the fresh ingredients you can easily incorporate. That might make it seem counterintuitive to blend your morning smoothie the night before. If you give it a good shake in the morning, you will still get basically the same effect but without waking up the neighbors. If you like the little frozen chunks of fruit that you get in a fresh smoothie, that might not work for you, though.

Even relatively quiet blenders generate quite a bit of sound. The quietest blender we tested still produced as much sound as a vacuum cleaner, and most of the units we tested were much louder than that. If you live in close quarters and want to keep neighbors and family members happy, it might be worth some effort to dampen the sound, or at least wait to blend until everyone is awake. The things we tried did not drastically reduce sound, but they helped a little and are definitely worth a try.

Angie Parkinson

A contracted writer for TTR, Angie has been reviewing vacuum cleaners, countertop appliances and other home goods for more than eight years. Her spare time often goes to planning improvements for her quirky 103-year-old home or hiking in the gorgeous Utah mountains. In her past role, she was a newspaper journalist and she has a bachelor's degree in Technical Writing.