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I have a few bench burners on my second story house. While the dry wall has been replaced with a double layer of Type X 5/8 drywall with off-set sockets I worry the floor. Due to the layout of the house and the room beneth it, adding to the ceiling of the floor below is not ideal.

The room currently has carpet. I plan on tearing it out and either sparying the wood with Inspecta-Shield, which is effective by raising the flame ignition point up to 2500 degrees F thereby slowing or eliminating the flame ingition. (ie. paper ignites at approx. 350 degrees F, glass at 1800, etc). Or should I line the floor in fire grade ceramic tiles? I have heard that I could line the floor in metal sheets, but I don't think I need to or have the capacity to do so anyway.

What should I do?

allindal
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2 Answers2

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You can install cement board on the subfloor and then any flooring you'd like on top of that. The cement board isn't that thick and is typically used to firm up the floor before installing tile, but you could put whatever you like on top.

However, rather than making the place only able to contain the fire, I'd consider installing sprinkler heads in the room to put out any fires before they have a chance to spread.

BMitch
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  • @B Mitch I have a supression system in the basement, solution from [this](http://diy.stackexchange.com/questions/4354/how-to-fire-proof-a-room) question, but I really don't want to to run the lines upstairs. – allindal Apr 05 '11 at 17:30
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Fire grade ceramic tiles sounds like overkill to me. You might only need about 50mm layer of concrete or screed to keep even fairly high fire temperatures out for 60 minutes because of the thermal inertia and relatively low conductivity of concrete.

Edit

Just re-read my answer here and I noticed I forgot to mention one thing. Although you can get away with thin layers of concrete to provided temperature protection, concrete is prone to spalling in a fire caused by the water in the concrete pores turn to steam and epxanding. Tiles or similar may well deal with this problem, but if you want to be sure the usual fix is to add some polypropylene monofilament fibres to the concrete mix. These melt in a fire and create a path for water vapour to escape rather than steam pressure building up.

Ian Turner
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