Pump House Roof
It is now old news that we decided to go with an eco friendly construction for our pump house. An eco friendly house may mean different things to different people. A truly eco friendly house is the one that is built with recyclable or reused building materials from another construction etc, leaving as much of a small carbon footprint as possible. While we are not into that extreme, we wanted to try to use sustainable material where possible and not increase footprint by transporting them from far off places just for the sake of recycling. Once such decision we had to take was for the roof material. Initially we were considering the regular cement roof. Then, once we decided to go with eco friendly bricks, we wondered if we should go for eco friendly roof like Mangalore tiles.
We know a couple of farmer families who have used discarded Mangalore tiles from other houses from their respective nearby villages. We thought that this was a good idea. But we had some problems. First, we don’t know anyone in the near by villages. Ideally we should have rented a place in one of the villages, stayed there, made some acquaintances and then probably should have gone for construction. But given our constraints we couldn’t do it. Then there is the problem of finding workers who can load, transport and unload at our location. Finally we need to find someone who is skilled at laying out roof tiles. Being the lazy people that we are, we did not put much effort into finding any of those details. We were totally depending on our contractor to do things for us mostly.
Eventually we decided to go with whatever roof is the cheapest. In future, when we build our real farm house we can build a more eco friendly roof. At this point we have a few choices. One choice we thought about a lot was a metal roof. We thought that when the pump house is no longer needed, we can at least reuse the metal roof for something else. But many people discouraged us from using that material for roof. One reason they mentioned was that it will be very noisy during rainy season and the other reason is that it gets really hot in the summers. Those seemed like reasonable arguments. Going with a metal roof would have saved us some cost because it was cheap and reusable for a temporary set up such as the pump house.
Anyway, we decided against using metal roof. The next cheap option we had was asbestos sheets. These were the kind of roofs which were used earlier. They are cheap, don’t make a lot of sound when it rains and moderately insulating in the hot summers. They are also easy to install. However, there is one major problem with it – asbestos is a health hazard. Obviously, that quickly ruled out this option. While we don’t plan to live in the house, we did not want to have any health problems even for the short duration visits.
The problem we have with metal roof is that it is noisy during rains and gets hot in summers. So what if we go with a Polyurethane foam metal roof? Basically, they are metal roofs with Polyurethane foam sandwiched between metal. It provides thermal insulation as well as noise insulation during rains. Everything sounds very rosy except for the price. They are very expensive.
One more problem with all the roofs discussed so far is that the roof is not strong enough or stable enough to place a water tank on top of them. Which means we need another metal structure where we can place our water tank (see picture below). Remember that we wanted to have a bathroom in the pump house. Hence the need for a water tank. Otherwise we could have avoided all these kind of problems. Well, you make one design choice and it has a cascading effect on others.
Eventually we decided to go with the non eco-friendly and slightly expensive cement slab. It was the best and cheapest alternative for now.