An implementation of simulated annealing and tabu search is described for discrete versions of two noxious facility location problems —p-dispersion andp-defense-sum. A series of computational experiments leading to good choices of the parameters that drive simulated annealing and tabu search are presented for a 33-node data set. Using these parameter settings, the performance of simulated annealing and tabu search are compared to a semi-greedy heuristic for thirty randomly generated 25-node data sets.