Damping the fires

There is any number of perfectly good reasons to live in Bahawalpur. Summer is not one of them. For six or seven months of the year the city basks in a relatively equable climate, edging towards the distinctly chilly in December and January. But come summer it turns into a cooker, and to bring self-inflicted pain to meteorological misery I built myself an office extension that gets direct sunlight on three sides. With the temperature outside in the low 50’s and the air-conditioner gasping with exhaustion it was time to bail out, work in the office having become impossible. Enter once again the Bijli Wallah. And Facebook.

The Bijli Wallah has featured often enough in these columns to have formal guest status. He is a Universal Soldier, a paragon, a man who converts common sense into practical outcomes and without whom my life would be considerably less comfortable. He is a man of few words and he tapped the door of my downstairs hobby room that was the camp office, raised an inquisitorial eyebrow, pointed upwards and said ‘coating’.

Coating indeed. Not an ordinary paint but a coating for the office roof that was reflective and would lower the temperature inside to something more bearable. Things tend to happen fairly fast once Bijli Wallah gets on the job and come Sunday last his gang were hard at it, done by sundown. “Wait till tomorrow afternoon” says BW.

Thus it was that in the late afternoon of last Monday I opened the upstairs office door and… it was quite definitely cooler. To be precise it was three degrees cooler, which does not sound like much but is in reality the difference between a working workplace and somewhere to roast a chicken. Thanks, BW.

In the way of all life-changing events these days my entry to the world of the relatively cool was duly posted on Facebook — and then things got really interesting. Turned out that a lot of people were very interested in my recent conversion to Coolio, and had their own tales to tell. I learned of not just coatings but the benefits in terms of heat dissipation of a roughened surface (Aga Khan Hospital, Karachi) and a great deal about the thermal inefficiency relative to the prevailing climate of most of the houses we build today. They are hot-boxes made of concrete blocks that soak up and retain heat like the proverbial sponges.

Several people weighed in with the benefits of massed flower pots on the roof as insulation, and yet more on the woes we suffer at the hands of modern building methods as opposed to ‘the old days’. Eco-friendly solutions got posted, including an intriguing re-purposing in Bangladesh of plastic soft drink bottles as an electricity-free form of both cooling and ventilation. An idea waiting for an enterprising NGO in our desert areas to get its head around. Or perhaps they already have and I just do not know about it.

And then there were the wonders of a closed-cell foam insulation that according to one respondent took the inside temperature of their house down by a whole eight degrees. Now that made me sit up straight. Eight degrees? As these words are typed BW is out busy putting together a set of estimates. A hunt around the internet indicated that this is far from being a budget solution, but the potential saving on the electricity bill spread over time suggests that the cost of insulating my roof would be worth the investment.

Lastly in the tale of cool and cooler, Google Earth. Were there any other white roofs around me I wondered? There were not. There were a scattering of obviously white roofs in modern developments around the city, but few and far between. So I looked at my home village. A place where not much has changed in donkeys years building-wise (… it is dying on its feet but that is another story) and lo-and-behold — white roofs! Not the modern and expensive coating that was atop my office but a mix of lime, cow dung and straw and yes, it works.

I can see a man on the roof with a tape-measure and a calculator in his hand. Stay cool. Tootle-pip!

Published in The Express Tribune, June 23^rd, 2016.

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