FIRESAFE SHINGLES

Michael Holigan: Every year fires cause more than four billion dollars in damage to homes in the U.S.. There are chemical fire retardants that can help minimize damage and even keep a fire from erupting and spreading through your home. Watching how they work under controlled circumstances is pretty impressive.

Donny Stanfield: This is a wood shingle that supposed to be on top of a house. And I can put the torch up there against it and you can see how fast and easy it starts on fire. I mean, it'll virtually burn up as quick as possible, especially if it's out in the wind.

M.H.: Yeah, they definitely go fast.

D.S.: Okay. Sit that down here. This is one I had treated with Flamesafe Shinglesafe (972-243-0263) and you put the blow torch right up against it and hold it there as long as you want to. I've held it up there against a wood shingle before twenty minutes.

M.H.: How about newspaper? I see you brought some of it.

D.S.: Okay. This has been treated at one end, and one end hasn't. I will burn the end that has not been treated first. And as it gets up to where the Flamesafe is, it just goes out.

M.H.: It stops.

D.S.: It just goes completely out.

M.H.: Donny, how do you treat your house so the material doesn't burn?

D.S.: We have it there in a sprayer. We come in and spray it down, get it pretty well saturated. Some places we get tight, we can put it on with a paintbrush or a roller brush, but it's best to put it on with an air sprayer. And it takes just a couple of hours to dry and after that it's completely protected.

M.H.: So you can do a house like this that's under construction while the wood is exposed?

D.S.: Yes sir. And when we do a house like this, it's a lifetime guarantee that it won't ever catch on fire.

M.H.: Is there any danger of the material around children or pets? Or is there anything you should not apply Flamesafe to?

D.S.: It's nontoxic. It will not hurt plants, animals, use it in the food area, it will not hurt anything. We coat everything that will burn. On carpet and the drapes and the furniture, if you steam clean them, it might be a good idea to put a little bit more on them because the steam may take some of it out of there.

M.H.: The price of chemical fire retardants can vary, but a product like Flamesafe normally runs about thirty-five cents per square foot on a home under construction. In other words, a 2,000 square foot house would cost about $700. If you have wood shingles, you can expect to pay about fifty cents per square foot for the roof itself. Wood shingles can spell disaster. House fires like this one can skip from home to home in a neighborhood with wood shake. Many communities have outlawed them altogether. But if you feel you must have wood shingles, it's a good idea to have the shakes treated with a tested and guaranteed fire retardant. Fire officials say the best method is buying wood shakes that have been pressure treated with fire retardant chemicals in a factory, but spray-on fire retardants can be effective for a number of years. This one is guaranteed to protect your roof for a minimum of 5 years, and it's been tested and approved by U.L. Laboratories and other research labs. Fire Marshall Russ Mower has a simple way you can test a fire retardant before having it applied to your home.

Russ Mower: A real unscientific test would be to take a sample of the wood shingle that the sales person gives you and just throw it in your dishwasher and run it through a cycle of the dishwasher using just a regular dish washing detergent and then dry it out real good to see if it burns. And you'll see how well the products going to weather that way, and you'll be able to compare one product to another.

M.H.: Russ points our some other good considerations too.

R.M.: As a Fire Marshall, I'm not going to tell you not to put a fire retardant treatment on your roof, because anything that you can do to an untreated wood shingle roof to make it more fire resistant is a help. But the cost of some of these treatments get real close to the cost of re-roofing your house with composition shingles. So when you look at what that breaks down as a cost per year, you can take a treatment, say for a $100 a square, or about a dollar a square foot, that's going to last three or four years, and you compare that to putting the same amount into a new roof that may last you 30 years. So obviously in that situation the new roof is the better investment. There are numerous companies in most metropolitan areas that sell these products and look closely at them and even call your local Fire Marshall to see what he or she has to say about them.

Episode 42 1996 - 97 Season

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