The Guy on the Other Side of the Wall: Seven Weeks of My Roommate’s Anti-Snoring Device

The wall between my bedroom and my roommate’s is about nine centimetres of plasterboard. I know this because I measured it one night at 3 a.m., with a tape measure, standing on a chair, because I had nothing else to do while lying awake listening to him.

His name is Rafi. He works four nights on, three off, in a warehouse that never closes. Four nights in a row he sleeps from roughly 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Then, on his first day off, he tries to flip back to being a normal human being and goes to bed at midnight like the rest of us.

That flip is the problem. When he sleeps in the day, I’m at work. When he sleeps at night, his snoring is ten feet from my head.

This is not my story about wearing an anti-snoring device. It’s my story about living next to someone who started wearing one — which, it turns out, is a completely different story, and honestly the one nobody writes. What follows is seven weeks of notes, kept on my phone, mostly in the dark.

Before: the baseline weeks

For the first two months we lived together, I treated my sleep like a weather forecast. I’d check his rota before I made plans. Nights he was on shift: quiet flat, I’m fine, I can sleep. Nights he was off: I’d put in earplugs, which are useless, and I’d lie there doing the thing everyone does when someone snores, which is feel personally insulted by it.

I started keeping a note out of pure spite. Night one: woke me up three times, last time 4:20, gave up at 6. Night two: two wake-ups, still awake when his alarm went at 5. It was petty, but it turned out to be useful later, because it gave me something to compare against.

That first fortnight, my average was two to three wake-ups a night, and about five hours of actual sleep on the nights he was home. I was not subtle about it. I banged a cupboard at breakfast. He apologised, genuinely, every time, and nothing changed, because apologising is not a thing that helps.

Week 1: he half-wore it and I half-noticed

He came home with the device on a Tuesday, showed it to me in the kitchen like a man showing off a new watch, and then for the first two nights he didn’t wear it. Not stubbornness — nerves. He said it felt strange to put something around your throat and then voluntarily fall asleep.

Night three he wore it. My notes that week are unimpressed:

• Night 1 of wearing it: still loud. Woke once, around 2.
• Night 2: quieter for the first couple of hours, then it came back.
• Night 3: he took it off at some point — I found it on the kitchen table in the morning.

Here’s the part I want to be fair about. Around day five, he told me he’d worked out that he’d been fitting it wrong — sitting a bit too low, and he wasn’t checking the little indicator before actually lying down. He’d been putting it on and then immediately rolling onto his side, which pushed it out of position. Once he started checking it after he was already lying down, the difference was audible from my side of the wall within about three nights.

Week 3: the night I forgot to check my notes

That’s the honest turning point. Somewhere in week three I went to add an entry and realised the previous three days were blank — not because I’d skipped them, but because nothing had woken me up. That had not happened since he moved in.

I want to be precise about what changed and what didn’t. He still made noise. There were still nights with a rough patch around 1 a.m. But the shape of the night changed from a wall of sound with no gaps to long quiet stretches with occasional interruptions. And the interruptions stopped being the kind that sit you upright. They were the kind you half-hear and roll over through.

He showed me the app one morning — I’d never asked before. It logs the night: how long he spent in the position that makes him snore worst, how many snoring events it picked up, and a rough total of snoring minutes. He’d been sitting at somewhere around forty-eight minutes of snoring on an average pre-device night, which, whatever, felt about right to me from my side of the wall.

At the end of week three that number was in the low twenties. I don’t think either of us expected it to move that fast, and he was careful to say it might be a good week rather than a cure.

Week 5: the night in the van

This is the part that has nothing to do with our flat and everything to do with why I now think the device is doing more than I gave it credit for.

He picked up a five-day run delivering stock between two sites, driving a van, sleeping wherever he stopped. Four nights in motels — fine, he wore it, I have no data, I wasn’t there. But the middle night the motel was fully booked by a trade fair, so he slept in the back of the van at a service area, tilted the seat back, and wore it there.

He texted me at 6 a.m.: “slept in the van, actually slept, weird.” What he told me afterwards is the bit that stuck. On the drive he’d started nodding off in the afternoon, which is a genuinely dangerous thing for someone covering 400 kilometres a day, and he’d been compensating with the kind of energy drinks that make your hands shake. After the van night he said the next day’s drive was the first one in months where he wasn’t fighting his own eyelids at 3 p.m.

I don’t want to over-sell that. He also stopped at that same service area on the way back and slept nine hours in a motel bed, so it wasn’t purely the device. But he’d slept sitting up, in a van, in a jacket, and still came out the other side of the night in one piece — which for someone who snores the way he does is not a small thing.

Week 7: the numbers on my side of the wall

I kept my own log the whole way, so here it is next to his, because the pair of them tell a more honest story than either one alone.

Two things I’d point out about that table, because tables flatter themselves. First, week 5 climbs back up — travel weeks are messy and he was sleeping badly for reasons that had nothing to do with his airway. Second, the number that matters to me is the third column, and the honest reading of it is that his device gave me back two hours of sleep a night by week seven. His snoring minutes are his business. My sleep is mine, and this is the first time in eight months I’ve had it.

What I’d tell the next person who has to live next to one

• Give it three weeks, not three nights. The first week is not representative. Half of week one is just the person learning how to put it on.
• Fitting matters more than the device. I watched that whole thing hinge on him repositioning it after lying down. Nobody tells you that.
• Put the charging cable somewhere you can both reach. Sounds dumb. He forgets, wears a dead one, and I get a bad night. It has happened four times.
• Ask to see the app once. I did, and I stopped guessing about whether it was working. That alone repaired about half the resentment.
• Don’t make it a moral issue. I did that for two months. It made the flat worse and changed nothing about the noise.

The thing nobody writes about

Posts about anti-snoring gear are always written by the person wearing it. That person has the least useful vantage point in the room. They’re asleep. They can tell you whether it was comfortable and whether their throat felt dry. They cannot tell you what the actual night sounded like.

From my side of nine centimetres of plasterboard: for the first two months it sounded like a small engine idling with a fault. Now — most nights — it sounds like a person breathing. That is the entire review. It is a much smaller claim than the marketing makes and a much bigger one than I expected to be writing when I started keeping notes out of spite.

He still works four nights on. I still wake up at seven. The difference is that when he’s off, I do too.

(Written from a seven-week phone log kept by a housemate, with numbers shared from the device’s own app. One person’s experience, seen from one particular angle — yours will look different, and any single week can be a bad week. Nothing here is medical advice. If someone in your household snores heavily, stops breathing in their sleep, or is exhausted during the day, the right next step is a doctor, not a gadget.)