Fiber cement board, hardiflex as popularly known by that popular brand that started it all, is everyone’s favorite partition wall material. Why not concrete hollow blocks? Well, the house owner would prefer you use concrete for his walls, but when the budget does not allow, just go for fiber cement – it will have a range of advantages compared to concrete hollow blocks. The only advantage the concrete wall has over fiber cement is strength (you can’t punch concrete wall and expect to make a hole like when you punch a fiber cement wall) and better sound proofing compared to fiber cement, other than that – the fiber cement has more advantages. Here are the advantages of fiber cement walls over concrete:
-Better thermal insulation – even if you don’t place additional thermal insulating material inside the air gap. Unlike concrete wall, there is a hollow gap in between the two fiber cement boards thus heat that goes beyond the fiber cement itself is cut by the air inside the metal furring supports inside the fiber cement wall. This same hollow air gap inside the fiber cement wall is also the same element that causes the sound from the other room to reverberate as if like a diaphragm and transfer to the other room, and the solution for this is to place insulating material like egg trays, wool, or aluminum foil to dampen the heat and at the same time weaken the sound reverberation so that only little sound could pass through to the other room. But still, as far as sound dampening is concerned, the concrete wall is still better because the sound is almost totally absorbed by the pebbles (aggregate materials) in the concrete mix and, also in the concrete hollow blocks if the concrete wall has hollow blocks in between. So, one could place his ear flat on the wall as if using it as a sphygmomanometer – that hearing instrument used by the doctor to hear the sounds from the patient’s body, and you will hear better if the wall is fiber cement than that of the concrete to which you will hear almost nothing, less the sounds from your imagination.
-Lighter – this is self-explanatory – definitely the fiber cement board is way lighter compared to concrete – this will definitely make your build lighter – less stress on your floor beams.
-Faster patching and painting – Since it is already very flat, then you only need to patch the screws and the joints to hide it. By the way, for ceiling, we highly recommend you place a screen tape – that screen mesh like tape under your patching material since ceiling move during earth vibrations and strong winds – to prevent the dried patching from cracking in the joints. If you’re looking for the cheapest screen tape at only forty-five pesos each roll, just head to your nearest unitop / baosheng / kakeng Chinese mall shop.
-Fire retardant – so its also best for ceiling material – it prevents fire from spreading rapidly – this is why condominium and hotels prefer this and will not even allow you to use any wooden material for your ceiling.
-Easier to demolish – so when you feel like to you need to fuse two rooms together to make it bigger in the future, then you don’t need that noisy ear-breaking jack hammer to demolish the fiber cement wall, you can just use your karate skills to demolish the entire wall easily in a few minutes, but If you don’t know karate then maybe it’s a great opportunity for you to start practicing it on your fiber cement wall – just don’t karate it during your fight with your spouse, only when you need to renovate.
-Faster to build – thus it will save you a lot on the cost of labor since it only takes a few minutes to install one sheet of four by eight feet compared to the smaller hollow blocks.
-Cheaper to build – Each fiber cement nowadays costs about five hundred pesos only – compare that to how much hollow blocks you need to cover a four by eight feet space.
Perhaps the major downside of fiber cement wall compared to concrete is, if your budget doesn’t allow it, also its cost – this means your visiting guests will think you’re cheap when they know and feel that your house partition walls are made of fiber cement. And if your kid likes to tap and bang on the walls a lot, it will certainly create that cheap sound noise of fiber cement.
To the home owner who can afford concrete partitions, there is nothing like the sound of solid concrete when one taps it.
If you know other advantages of the fiber cement wall over concrete, let us know…
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