Blue Door Painters explains how to use coatings to help protect your home from fire.
It’s been a long, hot summer, and the violent electrical storms we have been graced with in the Washington, DC area this season are likely to continue as we enter the dog days of August. While the humid air helps control the environmental fire hazards, the heat and the lightning that we have experienced puts homeowners at risk. Everything is hotter than usual – and therefore that much closer to combustion.
Fireproofing your home, and making preparations for fire emergencies, is a task requiring many approaches. You need to know what fire is and what causes it, make a plan determining the response of everyone in the household in the event of a fire emergency, and also come up with a comprehensive physical and behavioral plan for fire prevention.
Selecting the right coatings and building materials, when redecorating and remodeling, is a critical element of fire protection. Technology has greatly improved the fire resistance of paint products, since the historical role of flammable paints in many major calamities has been well-documented. Historically, the binder used in paint products was highly reactive and no attempt was made to add fire-resistant chemicals to the mixture; the combination of flammable paint and wood as a primary building material was disastrous, especially during hot, dry spells.
Manufacturers and builders have had hundreds of years to learn from those mistakes. Far from being flammable, most modern paints and other coatings are highly flame-resistant, and designed to protect potentially vulnerable building materials – like wood and drywall – from threats of fire. In this way, modern coatings actually help fight fires for you.
Wood will burn at 572 degrees Fahrenheit, provided it is exposed to enough air to carry out the combustion reaction. Coatings can help resist fires in two ways:
1) By resisting heat buildup, deflecting temperatures up to 700 degrees away from the underlying building materials, paint can prevent flammable substances (like wood and some kinds of drywall) from getting hot enough to ignite.
2) By having extremely high flash points, modern paints do not ignite at the temperatures that occur in a normal fire. Latex paint, the most commonly used type of paint on the current market, is water-based and non-flammable. The chemical formulation of modern oil paints – known as “alkyds” – has eliminated flammable solvents from the mixture and provided fire-retardant additives that make the flash point of these substances even higher.
When you are shopping for paint, the flash point (meaning, the temperature at which a substance will ignite) for both the liquid and the solid phase of the substance will be advertised on the can. If you are painting around electrical boxes, in boiler rooms, or in the kitchen, you may want to look for brands of paint that are heat- and fire-resistant; these will have heat-deflecting properties as well as an extremely high flash point. Sherwin Williams and Benjamin Moore both sell specialized flameproof paint that will give you the peace of mind you need that your home is safe from fire. If you want more information about fireproofing, the flammability of paints and other coatings, or the best way to use coatings to help protect your home, contact us for a free estimate.