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Component Manufacturing dverti$er
Don’t Forget! You Saw it in the
Adverti$er
November 2018 #10232 Page #90
Questions Answered: Making Wood Connections Work for Two-Hour Fire Walls By Paul McEntee, S.E.
In this article, Paul McEntee follows up on our July 25 webinar, Making Wood Connections Work for Two-Hour Fire Walls, by answering some of the interesting questions raised by attendees.
W
e presented an hour-long webinar recently about using fire wall hangers in Type III wood-frame buildings, how they are tested and what the code requirements are for these buildings. In case you weren’t able to join our discussion, you can watch the on-demand webinar and earn PDH and CEU credits online. As with our previous webinars, we ended with a Q&A session for the attendees. But clearly, we needed more time to chat. Tom Evans, our project manager for hangers, and I answered as many as we could in the time allowed, but we were quickly overwhelmed. Following the webinar, we sat down and answered all of them. Here are some of the commonly asked questions and their answers, but if you’d like to see the full list, it is online.
Fire Wall Hanger Code Definitions and Requirements Isn’t there a difference between two-hour firewalls and twohour fire-rated walls? A two-hour fire-rated wall includes all wall types with a two-hour rating. A two-hour fire wall is more specific and has the requirement of maintaining its independence and integrity regardless of whether the adjacent floors or roof fails. I would like a clarification — how would the provisions of the 2015 IBC Section 706.2 Structural Stability be compliant with this solution for a “Fire Wall”? I see how this would work with a Fire Partition and a Fire Barrier. The typical application for use in Type III construction would be a “Fire Barrier” because a wall needs floors on both sides for structural stability. A “Fire Wall” application may be at an interior area separation wall where there is framing on both sides of the wall. So if one side burns away, the floor framing on the other side is there to provide stability. In a lot of multi-family projects, the walls are double 2x4 walls with an airspace, primarily for sound. That also helps meet the fire requirements, since the framing and wall on one side could burn away leaving the other wall still intact. However, I suppose technically that’s not a fire wall but two independent fire barriers. Continued next page
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