Nobody ever raises a ticket that says "the pod has lost about four decibels of speech reduction". What happens instead is that someone walks past while a colleague is having a difficult conversation, hears more of it than they should, and feels awkward. Then it happens again. Then people quietly stop using that pod for anything sensitive, and it becomes the one everybody takes their headphones into.
A pod that has stopped being private does not break. That is the whole problem. The door still shuts, the light still comes on, the fan still runs, and every visible signal says the thing is working. Meanwhile the one property the organisation paid $14,200 to $31,800 for has quietly gone.
Here are the five things that actually cause it, in the order we expect to find them, and a three-minute test that will usually tell you which one you have.
First, why it is invisible
Acoustic performance in a pod is not a property of the walls. It is a property of the weakest path — and in a pod that is almost always the door. Framery publishes 30 D(S,A) dB speech level reduction, Class A under ISO 23351-1, for the Framery One, One Compact and Four. That figure is measured on a correctly assembled pod with a door meeting its seal evenly along the full closing edge.
Take away a few millimetres of seal contact at the top corner and you have not lost a few per cent of the performance. You have opened a leak path, and sound is extremely good at finding one. A small, invisible gap can undo a lot of very expensive engineering.
The other reason it is invisible is that it happens slowly. Nobody notices a change of a decibel or two between one week and the next. They notice it three years later, all at once, in the form of a conversation they wish they had not overheard.
Cause 1: the door seal has taken a compression set
This is the most common single cause, and it is straightforward physics. A seal works by compressing. Every time the door closes, the material is squashed; every time it opens, it should spring back. Do that fifty times a day for four years and eventually it stops springing back all the way. That is a compression set, and once it happens the seal is no longer filling the gap it was designed to fill.
Heat accelerates it. So does contamination — dust, hand cream, and especially anyone who has tried to "help" by putting silicone spray or furniture polish on a squeaky seal. Do not do that. It attracts grit and can degrade the material.
What it looks like: press the seal with a thumb while the door is open. A healthy seal dents and comes back. A finished one stays dented. Look at the corners too — seals fail at corners first, and a section that has lifted out of its channel at the top is very common and very easy to miss because nobody looks up.
Seals are a replaceable part. Framery covers them for two years as a wear part, which means most pods in Australia are well past it.
Cause 2: a levelling foot is not touching the floor
This one surprises people, because there is nothing wrong with the pod at all.
A pod sits on adjustable levelling feet, and it relies on all of them bearing to hold the cabinet square. Commercial carpet compresses under a load of several hundred kilograms. Floors settle. Someone shoves the pod eight centimetres to make room for a plant. Any of those can take one foot out of contact.
When that happens the cabinet twists — only slightly, but the door frame twists with it, and a door that was hung to meet its seal evenly now meets it at an angle. The seal is fine. The door is fine. The geometry is not.
What it looks like: push gently at the top corners of the pod and feel for any rock or give. Then look at the gap between door and frame at the top, middle and bottom. It should be consistent. If it is tighter at the bottom and open at the top, or vice versa, you are looking at a levelling problem, not a seal problem.
Fixing it properly means levelling at four points and then re-checking the door — because correcting the level moves the door, and a pod that has been sitting twisted for two years may also need the hinge re-set.
Cause 3: hinge drift and a tired gas spring
Pod doors are heavy — full-height glass in a frame — and they get used hard. Hinges take up a little play over thousands of cycles. Gas springs weaken; that is what gas springs do.
The tell is behavioural rather than visual. Watch how people close the pod. If the door needs a push, a pull, or a shoulder to latch, it is no longer closing onto the seal under its own designed force — and every one of those forced closes puts load into the hinge, which makes the alignment worse. It is a loop that accelerates.
A door that swings shut and latches cleanly on its own is doing what it should. One that drifts open when held half-way, or slams, or has to be persuaded, is telling you the gas spring is done.
Catching this early matters more than catching the others early, because this is the one that damages other components while you wait.
Cause 4: something has been done to the pod
Pods attract modifications. In three years the average pod acquires some combination of:
- A screen, shelf or bracket mounted to a panel — which usually means somebody drilled it
- Signage or a booking tablet stuck to the glass
- Boxes, files or a plant stored on the roof, directly over the ventilation plant
- A cable run out through the door gap, which holds the seal open permanently
- A door propped open on hot days because the fan is not keeping up — usually itself a symptom of blocked ventilation channels
The cable through the door gap is the one we see most and it is completely self-inflicted: it defeats the seal along its entire length for the sake of one charger. If people are running cables out of the pod, the answer is to fix why the internal power is not working, which is normally a failed USB-C port or outlet.
It is also worth knowing that drilling or modifying the pod without the manufacturer's written consent voids Framery's warranty, as does fitting non-approved parts. A generic seal strip bought to save money is not an acoustic seal, and fitting one takes the whole pod out of cover.
Cause 5: it was never right in the first place
A meaningful minority of the pods we look at were never commissioned properly. They were delivered on a busy fit-out day, assembled quickly, levelled roughly, and signed off by somebody who had eleven other trades to chase.
Two questions worth asking about your own fleet:
Was an installation report ever filed? Framery's warranty activates when one is completed and submitted — it is not automatic on delivery. And Framery is not obliged to fix defects on a pod that was not installed by a Framery-trained installer. If you inherited pods with a fit-out, or with a building, there is a reasonable chance nobody ever did this.
Was it re-commissioned after it was moved? Pods get relocated constantly and are very often just walked across a floor and left. A relocated pod needs re-levelling, re-sealing and re-testing at the new position. In New South Wales there is a further wrinkle: the Building Commission's practice advice of 24 January 2025 treats office pods as rooms rather than furniture, with their installation handled as building work. No other state has published an equivalent position, and supplier compliance letters — ours included — do not bind an Australian certifier. If pods are moving as part of a fit-out, raise it with your certifier early.
The three-minute test
You need two people and a phone. This is not a laboratory measurement and it will not give you a number you can put in a report, but it will tell you whether you have a problem and roughly where it is.
- Person A goes inside and closes the door properly. Not a push — let it close the way it is meant to.
- Person A plays something with speech in it at a normal, slightly raised conversational volume. A podcast works better than music, because speech is what the pod is designed to stop.
- Person B stands one metre from the door and listens. You are not listening for silence — you should hear something. You are listening for whether you can make out words.
- Person B walks the perimeter slowly, ear about 20 cm from the surface, all the way round. Pay particular attention to the top corners of the door, the closing edge, and the base.
- Note where it gets louder. That is your leak path. If it is loudest along the door edge, look at the seal. If it is loudest at one top corner only, look at levelling and hinge alignment. If it is loud everywhere and evenly so, that is unusual and worth a proper look.
Do this on every pod on the floor in the same session and compare them to each other. Relative comparison is far more informative than any single result, and if one pod is obviously worse than its neighbours you have found where to spend your money.
What it is actually costing you
Worth being clear-eyed here, because "the pod is a bit noisy" does not sound like a budget item.
A pod is bought to solve a specific problem: people need to take calls, run interviews, discuss performance, talk to a doctor, or concentrate, and an open-plan floor does not allow it. When the pod stops delivering privacy, that problem comes back — but the capital has already been spent, so there is no obvious moment where anyone reviews the decision. The organisation just goes back to booking meeting rooms for one-person calls, which is the expensive habit the pods were bought to break.
Against that, a door seal is a consumable. Levelling is an adjustment. A gas spring is a part. The economics of fixing this early are not close.
Where to start
Run the three-minute test on every pod you have and write down what you find. Then read our Framery pod care and maintenance guide, which covers the routine — what to clean with what, what your cleaners should and should not touch, and the quarterly checks that catch most of this before anyone overhears anything.
If the test says you have a problem you cannot fix from the inside, that is what we do. Chair Dinkum is an authorised Australian Framery dealer and we service, repair and relocate Framery pods Australia-wide — including pods we did not sell. Seals, hinges, gas springs, levelling, ventilation, electrical, sensors and glass, with a written report and a measured privacy check you can compare against next year's.
If you are not sure where to start, a fleet condition audit is one visit and a report on every pod you own. Call 02 9640 0642 or send us the details — how many pods, which models, roughly when they went in. A photo of each pod is enough if you do not know the models.
Frequently asked questions
How long does a pod stay properly soundproof?
There is no fixed lifespan, because it depends almost entirely on how many times the door is closed. A pod on a quiet floor can hold up for years; one in a coworking space or a university library gets several times the cycles and will need attention sooner. What matters is that someone checks it periodically rather than assuming it is fine because nothing has visibly broken.
Can we just replace the door seal ourselves?
We would not recommend it. Fitting non-approved parts voids Framery's warranty, and a seal replaced without also correcting the door alignment and levelling usually fails again quickly — because the thing that killed the first seal is still there. If the pod is out of warranty and you want to try, at least establish first whether the real problem is the seal or the geometry.
Our pod gets stuffy. Is that the same problem?
Different problem, same neglect. Framery publishes maximum airflow of 36 L/s for the One Compact, 26 L/s for the Framery One and 100 L/s for the Framery Four. Dust and lint in the intake and extract channels reduce that quietly over time, and anything stored on the roof of the pod sits directly over the ventilation plant. Clear the channels, clear the roof, and listen to the fan for bearing noise.
Does a noisy fan affect privacy?
Slightly, and in both directions — a bit of fan noise masks speech, which is why a failing fan can make a pod seem to get less private when it is replaced. It is not a reason to leave a worn bearing alone. A seized fan is a much more expensive repair, and a pod nobody uses because it is loud inside is no better than one nobody uses because it leaks.
Is our warranty still current?
Check the component, not the pod. Framery's terms run 5 years on the product generally, 2 years on wear parts including doors, seals, hinges and locks, 2 years on electronics including LED lighting, fans, chargers, screens, sensors and motors, and 1 year on Framery Connect sensors. Defects must be notified within 21 days of discovery. Most Australian pods went in between 2021 and 2023, which puts them out of cover on everything that fails.
We have pods from a brand other than Framery. Can you help?
Not at the moment. We work on Framery pods only, because that is where we have manufacturer training and access to genuine parts. The diagnostic method above still applies to any pod — seals, levelling and door geometry are universal — so the three-minute test is worth running whatever badge is on yours.
Related reading
- Framery pod care and maintenance guide — the routine, surface by surface
- Soundproof meeting pods for Australian offices: Framery specification guide
- Acoustic pods in Australia: how to compare them honestly
- Specifying Framery pods for Australian commercial fit-outs
- Browse Framery soundproof pods, or the Framery One and Framery Four
