Fireworks For Sale in Bolton

Nearly every firework in this catalogue carries a noise rating from 1 to 5. If you have a reason to care how loud an evening is — and a great many people do — it is the most useful number on the page, and this is what it means.

How the ratings fall

170 pieces in the range are rated. Of those, 18 are rated 1 or 2, which is the genuinely quiet end. 15 more top out at 3. The remaining 136 reach 4 or 5 at some point, which tells you what the trade assumes most people want.

Plenty of pieces carry a range rather than a single figure, written as something like 3-5. That is not vagueness: it means the piece changes as it works through, usually building, so the loudest part is the end. A 3-5 is not a 3.

Why a low rating is not a compromise

The assumption behind the question is usually that quiet means small, and across these 18 pieces that is not what the rating is measuring. Noise and size are separate things in a firework. A large fountain can be rated 1. The pieces at the quiet end tend to be the ones built around what you see rather than what you hear, and an evening assembled entirely from them is a different kind of evening rather than a reduced one.

It is also the only part of the range that can be chosen for a reason other than taste. Dogs, horses, a baby in the house, a neighbour who has asked, somebody who finds bangs genuinely difficult — all of those are answered by the same 18 pieces, and nothing else in the catalogue answers them.

Reading it on the page

The rating sits with the other details on each piece, alongside the shot count, and the two together are most of what can be known without asking. Rated 1 or 2 with a high shot count is the combination worth looking for if the brief is a long evening that nobody complains about.

One warning: the ratings are the makers’ own, so they are consistent within a house and only roughly comparable between houses. A 3 from one maker and a 3 from another are close rather than identical, and that gap is exactly the sort of thing the counter can tell you about and a table cannot.