Episode #74: The next hot topic

Welcome to Glass Talk, Canada's podcast for the architectural glass industry.
Now here's your host, Patrick Flanery.
Hey folks, here with Robin Urquhart from rdh.
You all know rdh, big building engineering, building science guys out in bc And Robin's going to join us today to talk about building for wildfire resistance.
Everything you need to know about keeping your building from burning down.
But we're afraid to ask.
They had a really good conference with Fenestration Canada a couple of weeks ago.
I guess it was now.
And I just thought there was lots here to discuss and just give everybody some things to think about when you're trying to sell a product or do some contracting in those areas where you might get a fire.
So.
Hi, Robin, why don't you start out by giving us a little background on yourself and rdh.
Great.
Thanks, Patrick.
Yeah, great to be here.
So, as you mentioned, my name is Robin.
I'm an enclosure engineer for rdh.
I'm also a red seal carpenter.
I'm also a Wildfire enclosure specialist.
So at rdh, we deal with the enclosure.
It's the outside of the building, the roof, walls, windows, everything that you can see.
Basically anything that manages an environmental load.
And in this case, the environmental load is wildfire.
And so we've worked a lot lately on trying to enhance the resistance to wildfire of enclosures, of building enclosures.
And you know, we've been doing a lot of sort of in house research, working with government agencies, just trying to get a handle on this in Canada.
Yeah, great topic, important topic, timely topic, all that stuff.
We're coming into the season again here, obviously, so that's, it's a good time for everybody to be thinking about that stuff.
Why don't you start us off, Robin, with the codes and standards we need to think about when we're building for wildfire resistance, when we're designing our enclosures and our facades for, well, what needs to be met?
What are municipalities looking for?
Yeah, it's a really good question.
Especially, it's interesting, in Canada, we're a little bit different than what the states are doing.
The states are a bit ahead of us on this.
California's been dealing with this issue for 30 years already.
And so in California, they have a building code that's in the California building code and the California residential code.
And so they specify what buildings need to do to meet wildfire resistance.
In the US there's also the International Wildland Urban Interface Code, which some states or counties adopt.
In Canada, we don't have any Code.
So we have a guide put out by the National Research Council, that's the agency in Canada that actually does make the building codes.
But this isn't a building code, it's just a guide.
And it's the guide to wildland Urban intervention Face fires.
And so that's where we take sort of our, our cue on what to do in terms of wildfire resistance for buildings.
And, and we're just talking about buildings.
There's lots of landscaping, there's, you know, property safety ingress, egress, signage, stuff like that, but we focus on just on the building side of it.
But also in Canada we have programme called Fire Smart.
And Fire Smart's a great programme.
It's been around for a while and almost everybody's heard of it.
Fire Smart also makes recommendations on what you can do to your property and your building to enhance wildfire resistance.
And just recently, Fire Smart Canada has aligned its builders checklist with the National Research Council's guide for Wildland Urban Interface Fires.
So what we're doing in Canada is.
It took a little while, but we're kind of like coalescing all of the different guidance in Canada and recommendations just to turn it into like, hey, this is what you need to know.
So people aren't going like, this guy said this and this guy said this.
This is like, nope, you know, we actually know what we're doing.
It's been done before.
We're not reinventing the wheel here.
The states have been doing this for a while, which is where we get a lot of our information, codes and standards.
And this is what you need to know to make your, your building safe.
That said, so that's.
Those are the sort of where you get your guidance.
But in Canada, there is no requirement for wildfire resistant construction.
You know, you might have it in a zoning bylaw or something, or an architectural motif.
You can, you have to use certain materials, something that.
But in Canada we don't have any sort of like regulatory framework to ensure that people are building to a wildfire standard.
Are these documents the guidance and the Fire Smart, are these things that a municipality might insist on or like, do you see them, like zoning, that they're putting that in there for the bids in those areas?
Yeah, I mean, they don't grab the whole document because in Canada you can only do so much.
You can't really legislate beyond the code.
You can only do it through certain mechanisms that are open to municipalities, like a zoning bylaw or an architectural motif or something like that.
Architectural bylaw.
And so you do see it, you do see, like, let's use Jasper as an example because Jasper is, you know, just had a big wildfire.
And so they're looking at adjusting their architectural motif to bring in more enhanced wildfire resistance, specifically things like non combustible siding or not allowing cedar shake roofs, because that was shown to be like a significant vulnerability in Jasper.
And so municipalities are doing things like that.
It's a scattershot.
Kimberly Nelson has some.
I think Banff is doing something like that.
So yes, you can take aspects of wildfire resistance, but nobody's really taking it on cohesively, systematically.
That's where you get into something like a fire smart recognised neighbourhood, but it's totally voluntary and.
And then Firesmart will basically say, yeah, you've met all of the requirements or not.
Are you hearing of the builder asking for it in the specifications?
You know, I think that you brought up builder.
I think there's a huge opportunity in Canada for some people to start specialising in this, to start offering wildfire resistant construction.
You know, I, I can build to a wildfire resistant standard or whatever and just understand this stuff.
There are builders that have done it in L.
Because there was a programme like a financial incentive in Lytton to build to a wildfire resistant standard.
It was using the NRC guide that I mentioned earlier.
And there were builders that did it and we talked to them.
I mean, we worked on that project but they said it wasn't anything crazy.
Most of it they were already doing anyway.
So I think there's a huge opportunity here, whether it comes from the builder or the homeowner, whether it comes from the homeowner, because they were worried their insurance premiums or deductibles are going to go up.
There's going to be a market call for this at some point and we just need to know kind of how to fill it.
You know, there's a couple of gaps still that we don't fully understand.
One of them is Windows.
I think we'll talk about that.
But the other is just knowledge in the industry.
Like people just don't know what they're supposed to do or how to do it.
And yeah, I think that's one of our biggest hurdles.
Yeah, that's why you need those simple documents to.
Well, not simple documents, but I mean you need a document to point at and say, that's okay, that's what we're talking about.
And I guess that was kind of the topic in the Fencan call was NRCAN is starting to rally the information, collect the data, do the consultations, whatever.
So this could be something we see, and I mean without speculating too much, it could be something we see in the code in the next.
While for certain areas I imagine they'll have to do it like Energy Star or something and, and pick the areas that, that where you have to meet this.
Yeah.
And it may be some sort of tiered thing, sort of like the Energy code in, in the national building code right now.
Yeah.
And NRCAN is doing, they're working with builders, so they are seeking feedback from builders.
What's working for you, what's not?
How do we make this better?
What kind of guidance can we provide you that's going to make this simpler for you?
Because you take the NRC guide and it's not, it's a very good document, but it's all in code language and you put that in front of someone who's already in a rush, has low margins to begin with and they're just gonna be like, you know what, forget it.
I just need.
That's.
We're not doing that.
I need something that I can implement now.
I don't need to wade through code language and try and figure out what the heck this means and then go try and find someone to talk to.
So yeah, simplification, that's the name of the game right now.
We're definitely getting there.
There is a lot of good documents, a lot of good guidelines.
I don't think that's what should be stopping people.
Yeah.
So one of the fun things you get to do is make models and mock ups and burn them.
I saw some of the pictures and the video on the presentation.
Why don't you tell us?
So you're making a window, you're making a door, you're making really any building product, roofing, whatever.
You want to talk about siding, what are you going to have to go through as far as testing this and to be able to say you have some level of wildfire resistance?
Yeah, this is a good question.
I mean the testing that we do is mostly in house and it's demonstrative testing.
So it's not like we're not certifying any products or anything like that, but it's come up in a few things.
Litton, Jasper.
We've gone.
We did a forensic investigation of the Jasper Wildfire and we saw some things that looked like vulnerabilities that we didn't know exactly how vulnerable it was.
And in the field of engineering, if you make a recommendation, you better hope you can Back it up.
And so backing it up is like, okay, well, let's test this.
If we're going to recommend anything like this, let's test it.
Let's figure out what the failure threshold and mechanisms are so that we know that this is going to be safe in, you know, at resisting its design load.
In Jasper, we saw windows that were failing and we wanted to know how vulnerable is the existing window stock in Canada, you know, to, you know, to a while in a wildfire scenario.
Now, the loads in Jasper weren't always wildfire loads.
The building next to you being on fire, that's not necessarily a wildfire load, that's a structure fire load.
But we were seeing a lot of windows failing and in a wildlanderman interface, you're going to get structures on fire.
And so we want to know, like, how are windows performing in this?
And we especially saw a lot of wacky vinyl window failure mechanisms.
And so we wanted to see.
It doesn't mean that windows fail.
And I want to be clear, doesn't mean that all vinyl windows fail in a wildfire situation.
But we saw some things that made us be a little like, huh, that's interesting.
We should probably do some research there.
So we test walls, we test deck assemblies, we test any interface that we can think of as a vulnerability.
And lately we've really zeroed in on windows because in Canada we have good Windows standards, but none of them mention wildfire.
None of them test to a wildfire standard.
It's completely ignored.
That's fine.
But then we don't know how vulnerable they are in a wildfire.
And when we say fail, what we're looking for is, my impression is two things.
One is the window bursting or falling out and breaking and allowing obviously, flames and heat and smoke and everything in.
And then the other impression I get is that we're concerned about just heat and flame and I guess hot gas, whatever, being able to get in around it somehow or penetrate past the frame.
Are those the fail conditions that were.
Pretty much, I think, like, I would even characterise it as we're worried about the glass failing, or we're worried about the frame failing and the glass fails in really one of two ways.
It either falls out, like you're talking about, which could be considered a frame failure, or it just breaks.
You know, float glass is not particularly heat resistant.
If you don't believe me, like, pour boiling water in your cup and then go outside and throw it in a pile of snow.
It doesn't respond to thermal shock very well.
And it stresses across the pain from where it is hidden by the frame and relatively insulated to the heat versus where it's directly exposed to the heat.
That stress within the pain will cause fracturing.
And so glass will just fracture just because of heat or because of stress caused by heat differential.
And so the glass can break.
And when the glass breaks, then it's just a hole in your house.
And once.
And then the fire is inside your home and then it's game over.
Or the frame can fail.
That can fail if it's either it combusts or it deforms and melts out.
And yeah, those are the two primary frame failures.
And so in terms of windows, that's what we're looking for.
We test the entire window, not just the glass and not just the frame, because the interaction of those elements is sometimes important.
So you're building a wall, you're putting the window in, and then you're what, you're outside with a flamethrower.
How does that work?
It's not super different from that, actually, but it is a standard.
So we try and test everything to a known standard so that other people can do it too.
And also because a lot of research usually goes into these.
So the only Wildfire Window test standard out there is something from California.
It's called SFM12782.
SFM stands for State Fire Marshal.
And basically what it is, is it's, it's like a little flamethrower.
It's called a diffusion burner, but it's propane.
And it's set at the base of the wall.
It's about 36, 39 inches wide at the base of the wall and directing heat up at the base of the, at the bottom of the window.
The window's about 18 inches above that.
And so you light up this diffusion burner as a specified heat release rate.
So we know kind of what heat's coming out of it.
And, and then we let it go.
And you basically test it until it fails.
If the window survives eight minutes, we consider that a pass.
That's the test standard.
But we kind of want to know when it's going to fail and why it fails, because that might give us information.
But, and when you look at this test, you saw pictures of it in that fen can meeting, but it's not a, it's not a wussy test.
Right?
Like there's, you know, five foot high flames, the entire enclosures engulfed in, in this diffusion flame.
And so the window itself is significantly stressed.
It's being touched by flame, which is 1100 or 1200 degrees Celsius.
So for, you know, for at least eight minutes.
And yeah, and it's, it's a stressful test, but it's the one that at least California thinks is most representative of what it could see in a worst case wildfire.
I'm thinking about, as you say that I'm thinking about the gas cavity in insulating glass.
Is that going to cause.
Not that I mean everyone has insulating glass and they always will, but I mean does that actually cause an extra problem because it wants to expand and explode the unit?
Yeah, it's a good question.
The answer is we don't really know, but it could be a problem.
It is trapped.
I mean the likely before that air spans.
The pressure from the volume of air in the.
In the unit expanding is probably not super high.
I feel like the, the, the glazing tape and the adhesives can handle that.
But I think the paint will probably fail before.
Before the gas expansion fails it or if it does, I doubt it explodes the unit.
It would just.
It would just like break down the adhesive.
And so basically you just lose, you know, what happens to windows over time anyway?
You just, you get a perforation that you lose your, your air.
I think that's what would happen.
The spacer is going to fail.
Going to fail.
And the gas.
Yeah, essentially that's it.
Well, you know, we saw in.
In Jasper was spacer melting out and glazing tape melting out really quickly, like even before the pain broke.
Oh yeah, yeah.
It's not in the glass.
Weaker than the glass.
Yeah, it would, it would not.
It would not let.
So that.
Well, I don't even know if they want to stop that from happening in a way because of what we just talked about.
I mean you actually don't want to maintain the seal in that scenario.
So you know, it's, it's almost better to let the spacer as long as it doesn't mean the whole window's falling apart.
Well, yeah, and it's.
It's that like you can fix one problem and then you just have another problem.
Right.
So what would be great and what we'd love to get to and there are windows like this produced in the states is almost nothing happens like you want.
You know, it should be possible, we think it's possible to develop a window in Canada that passes this test and maybe it needs to be replaced at the end of the test.
I'm not sure.
But certainly does not show significant material Degradation, you know, and certainly does not let smoke, heat or embers inside the building.
That's what we really want to protect against.
And there's no, there's no reason to think that we can't design that window.
Quickly.
What regions of the country, I guess, would we be talking about here mostly?
Right.
I mean.
I mean, obviously, really?
B.
C.
probably almost everywhere except the lower mainland.
Yeah.
Alberta, Anywhere in the hills.
Yep.
Northern Ontario, sure.
Well, they had some pretty good fires in Saskatchewan a while back there, didn't it?
Saskatchewan?
You'd be surprised.
You'd be surprised at where wildfires can.
Nova Scotia.
You don't think about Nova Scotia?
One of our largest wildfire disasters was in Nova Scotia.
So it just requires the same.
The right conditions for a wildfire, the conditions to ignite and sustain combustion.
And that can be two to three weeks of just really dry temperatures.
And so we think, you know, there's lots of ways to assess your exposure and your risk to wildfire.
And I won't go too much into depth in that, but you're essentially right.
Like the Territories.
So Yukon and Northwest Territories especially.
Right.
Remember, like Yellowknife was evacuated.
BC almost everywhere, honestly, because the lower man that's drying out.
Alberta, almost everywhere again, Saskatchewan, pretty high.
And then you get into the Maritimes and Nova Scotia can get dry.
New Brunswick.
So at northern Quebec, northern Ontario, about.
I think the number is 12.
3 to 12.
4 million Canadians live in the wildland urban interface.
So it's 1 in 10 Canadians.
I think this affects.
Wow.
Wow.
And yeah, so I guess it would be.
Well, yeah, I mean, anywhere you've got a decent swath of trees without large breaks maybe for farmland in between them.
I mean, here in southern Ontario you have wood lots, but outside of the parks there's not a lot of unbroken stretches of trees.
But I'm just trying to think about what particular.
How much urbanisation you need before you don't need this standard anymore.
And I think probably most of Canada wouldn't qualify.
Yeah, it's a good question and something that I think also we need to.
What they do in the States is they have mapping really good maps and identify their high hazard, moderate hazard, low hazard, wildfire zones.
We could do something like that in Canada.
We could just adopt the same type of mapping exercises and then we'd have more clarity.
Like instead of a builder saying, well, how do I know if my house is in this?
The house I'm building is in own.
And it's like, well, yeah, totally.
How do you know you can talk to your local fire department, get a fire, you know, someone who's Fire smart, trained to come out and do an assessment.
That's a really good way to do it.
But in.
You know, what would be nicer is just to have a map that people could drill into their, you know, their little location, figure out if they're in a wildfire hazard area.
Okay, so that's.
But that is something that could be extracted from this Fire Smart programme.
Is, Is.
Is somebody could come and, you know, look at where you're planning to do something and say, yeah, this is.
This needs it or this doesn't.
Yep, absolutely.
And you could also use that documentation.
You could do your own self assessment.
Like, I think if you.
You kind of know if you.
If you live there or you want to live there, you kind of know what it's like.
You've got a big stand of pine trees next to you.
You know, it dries out every July.
Am I in a wildfire zone?
Well, you don't need to look at a map to tell you that.
Look in your backyard.
You know, like, it's.
If it's hot and dry and pines and, you know, you could have a problem.
I don't know if I do know, though, Robin, because I'm.
Because, you know, I looked at some of those.
I was looking at some of the videos or pictures or something from.
I think, for instance, Drayton, you remember they had a.
They had a big fire up there.
I do, yeah.
Everybody had to flee.
And I was kind of looking at the pictures.
I'm going, well, this looks like a town.
Like, it doesn't look like they're in the middle of a forest, but it was so, you know, intense that I guess it was still getting into the town a lot.
Well, it's.
Yeah, no, it's a really good point because it's not just the house that's next to the trees.
You know, a large wildfire, even a grass fire.
And this is what happened to Linton.
It spits embers ahead of it.
And 90%, up to 90% of ignitions are caused just by embers.
Sparks and embers coming ahead of the wildfire.
Most of the ignitions in Jasper, too, were caused by sparks and embers.
And then the house caught fire and then caught the next house on fire.
And it's a different scenario.
But it wasn't a wall of flames that hit Jasper, and it wasn't a wall of flames that hit Linton.
These were, you know, the.
It was a big fire in Jasper.
But didn't touch the town.
It was a little further away in Lytton.
It was a grass fire.
And so you got it.
You have to be thinking 100 metres in from the forest edge, 100 to 200 metres, you know, for those embers and making sure that you don't have conditions on your property or your building that if a number lands in it could cause significant problems.
You know, like a pile of dry straw next to your house is a terrible idea if you're 100 or 200 metres away from.
And having the bushes too close and all that stuff.
Yeah, that, exactly.
And that's a perfect segue to the next thing I had here.
You know, we have lots and lots of standards for fire resistance in homes and buildings, but they're all pretty much contemplating internal fires.
Right.
Something that starts inside the house and you don't want it spreading around in the house or having the whole house go up in a total conflagration that's spreading to other houses nearby.
That's been the whole thrust of the fire resistance thing.
Right.
But I know you got into a discussion on the conference, which I thought was awesome, with one of the guys, put up his hand and said, well, geez, when everything around you is burning like crazy and the whole town goes up in an hour, you know, what hope do you have?
And the explanation had to come out that it is about these embers and about just having some resistance to ignition on the outside.
Explain that a little bit.
Yeah, it's a good point.
There's two there.
So yes, the building code is very good at interior fires.
I did a recent just search of terminology in the building code.
Fire is mentioned 5011 times in the 2020 Building Code and only one of those is actually referring to an exterior fire.
So we're very good at interior fire and that's what fire separation distances are.
They are interior fires that you're worried about escaping through a window.
So we're back to windows again.
But it's, you know, and that's.
And then a 10 minute response time from your fire department.
Because a house that's, you know, fully involved takes a truck or two to really put it out.
But you have some time, you have 10 minutes before that fires.
That's the thinking before.
It's really going to be something you can't deal with in a wildfire scenario.
It's very different because all of your ignitions start from the outside and you can have multiple ignitions at once because the embers don't care.
It's a shower of embers and so it could light up 10 houses.
Well, if you're in a small town with two fire trucks, 10 houses, you're overwhelmed immediately.
And that's what happened in Lytton.
Within 15 minutes, I think, or 30 minutes, they would have needed 300 trucks to deal with it.
Like, like it's ridiculous, right?
So, so it's really about stopping that initial ignition.
Because once a house is on fire, it's a huge fuel package, it's a large amount of fuel and it burns hot and for a long period of time, it has a very good chance of catching another house on fire next to it.
And so it's about, you know, community, neighbourhood density, but also it's really about stopping those initial ignitions.
And that's where we're really focused on.
Every house in the wildland urban interface should be ember resistant at a minimum.
So, yeah, so we're hoping that, that the materials we've built with are enough that yeah, the ember might hit it and, but that it's going to cool down or blow away and that it lasts, it takes that long to start the ignition.
I guess that's where these eight minute numbers.
Well, that's for the window breakout, which is.
Roofs must be different.
How long is a roof supposed to resist?
Yeah, so roofs are a really good example because that is the test for roofs.
It's literally a burning brand test.
And it's called a class.
It gives you a class rating.
And so in wildland urban interface areas, you really want to have a class A rated roof.
And that gives you basically a flame spread and a smoke spread rating.
But the test is putting a burning brand on the roof and essentially letting it go out.
And that cannot ignite the roof.
It can't.
You know, if it's a metal roof, that means that the heat transfer isn't enough to ignite the framing below.
If it's asphalt shingle roof or something, it means that it's not going to melt or catch fire itself.
So luckily for us, most of the roofs that we have in Canada are class A or can be made class A very easily.
And so it's one of the easiest things that we can do.
And it's one of the most vulnerable elements because of its size and its orientation.
It's relatively horizontal, so everything wants to land on it.
That's also why we have class A roofs to begin with.
It's because in city fires, urban fires, you still get embers spit up and an ember from one house will land on the house next to it and you want that house to be able to resist that.
And you know all of these codes are coming from big urban conflagrations at the beginning of the 1900s and stuff.
But that's when we realised roofs are one of the big elements and we need a class rating for them.
And, and, and so it's very easy to do in Wildfire.
So we kind of figured out roofs because they were, that they were the big, the big problem.
And but, but yeah, we're lagging on the windows.
That's, that's, that's where the.
And the windows are at our special point of vulnerability because.
Well, I don't know why.
Well, I guess you know it's not going to go through brick.
So I mean basically the window is a hole.
So that's, you know, that's all there is to it.
And I guess siding doesn't.
I mean it's horror, it's vertical.
So I mean it's, it probably doesn't catch very much.
It doesn't.
It depends like what you.
At a minimum what you want for siding is a 6 inch clearance from grade of non combustible material because that's where leaves and embers and stuff blow up against your siding.
So for sure your cover board non combustible.
Then it really is nice to have non combustible siding or ignition resistant siding.
And the reason is, is because you know, as much as we would all love to be perfect property owners, we're not and we are going to pile stuff against our houses.
We even just wheeling up your.
I mean it happened in the LA fire.
So recent forensic investigations in LA showed a lot of ignitions caused by garbage cans.
So people wheel their garbage can back to their house or whatever.
It's plastic.
Maybe it's full of garbage.
Maybe the top's open because of critter just got into it.
Embers land in there and then that's a.
That's a big fuel package and then it burns and then it ignites the, the cladding on the house next to it and it crawls up and into the softening of the roof and it's game over.
So definitely ignition resistant or non combustible cladding.
But that's another easy thing to do.
It doesn't have to be brick.
Could be fibre cement, could be fire retardant treated wood.
Could be stucco.
All of these are really good options for cladding in a wildland urban intervey zone.
Yeah.
Okay.
Just not cedar shakes.
Just not cedar shakes.
Yeah, yeah.
Stay away from that.
We just recently went through a bit of an evolution in the window biz, which I'm sure you know about, where for a long time vinyl was considered combustible and aluminium was not.
And this was for the purposes of what you're allowed to put on a high rise.
And then that got challenged and a bunch of testing was done and they did your.
Well, I don't know if it was the exact same test because it was for high rise, but they blasted a bunch of heat and fire at aluminium windows and found that, well, damn it, they melt and fall out too, eventually.
And so consequently, we're now allowed to put vinyl up.
It's not considered to be, at least in the country, again, the context of a high rise, any worse than aluminium for fire resistance, but on a low rise or I guess, elsewhere.
Robin.
And also talk to fibreglass.
Talk to me about these different materials and where you might.
Are some of these going to be better than others?
Yeah.
So the test you're referencing is probably the can.
You'll see.
S134 test.
It's basically the same thing we were talking about before.
It's an interior fire that escapes a window and then crawls up the cladding.
Yeah, like.
Like the Grenfell Tower fire.
Yeah.
And.
And that's.
They put a.
It's a lot of heat they're using in that S134 test, and it's over a longer duration because it's interior fire and it's going to burn for a long time.
So the loading is a bit different than a wildfire, which you expect to be hot but fast.
And so the test we do is a different test, the SFM test, but it's not really super different.
It still is direct flame impingement on the cladding and the window package.
And so the different materials that you might be concerned about, or would be common in both high rise and residential vinyl, aluminium, fibreglass, all have vulnerabilities.
Vinyl, it really starts to kind of deform around 70 degrees Celsius, 70 to 100 degrees Celsius.
So it's not that hot, actually, but the vinyl is going to deform.
But vinyl doesn't catch fire really easily and it doesn't really want to sustain combustion, especially upvc.
And so there's lots of studies that show that vinyl tends to char.
That's a form of combustion, but it's not like flaming combustion.
It's not like sustaining itself.
Yeah, exactly.
It's smouldering and then aluminium melts.
At 660 degrees Celsius.
So you subject aluminium to high temperatures like a flame, for long enough and the aluminium will disappear.
And we've done testing on aluminium soffit vents and fascia, aluminium protective fascia.
And if you get combustible cladding and say it's ignited because of your garbage can, you can burn right through your aluminium fascia because the temperature is high enough and for long enough that it melts the aluminium.
And then you have fibreglass and fibreglass.
You know, the fibreglass itself isn't combustible, it's glass.
It eventually will melt, but at such a high temperature you don't worry about that.
But it's the resin, the resin is plastic and the resin is combustible.
And so there's ways to, you know, to treat all of those things.
You can, you could, you can have thermally broken aluminium frames, could do something a little bit, you know.
But I think for, in our case, for Wildfire, the temperature and the duration is not so much that we really worry about it from, for aluminium and we're not sure about vinyl and for fibreglass, we're also not totally sure, but we would think that maybe the addition of a fire retardant resin in the fibreglass might give you some, you know, it might, it might stop the combustion of the fibreglass, which is a lot of what happened.
You know, I think that's, that was developed in the S134 test.
Some of the fibreglass manufacturers realised they had to put fibre retardant resin in, in their fibreglass matrix because it was not passing the 134 test.
Interesting.
That's, that's fuel for more research.
I don't know who does a fire retardant resin and who doesn't.
And that would be.
If you were a manufacturer, you might want to, you might want to look into that.
So that's, that's, that's an interesting one because fibreglass and on the doors too.
Right?
So, I mean, you know, steel doors are steel doors, but, but if you, if you're doing a fibreglass door, I think they, you know what?
I have to look at the literature.
I think some of them do advertise fire resistant, fire resistant resin on the doors for sure.
I don't know about window frames, but it's a, it's a good thought.
Yeah.
Any evidence that, and this is going a little bit far afield, but any evidence that low E coatings do anything?
I don't know.
Yeah, there is, there's research in the states that a low E coating, like, as we know, reflects radiant heat.
And that's a good thing in a fire.
A fire is a lot of radiant heat.
And so that might do something to.
There's a couple of things that can do.
One, it limits the amount of radiant heat that makes it into the interior of the building.
Building.
So let's say you have drapes right up against your window.
You know, is the radiant heat enough to ignite the drapes or something pressed up against the window?
We saw this in Jasper.
We saw books, charring and mattresses against windows that were charring, but the window wasn't completely broken through yet.
So is radiant heat enough to get through a window and char something on the inside?
It's kind of this, like, maybe under the right circumstances, maybe if we had a tempered pane of glass, then, you know, which.
Which breaks at about 40 kilowatts per metre squared, and a highly combustible curtain that ignites around the same temperature, you could get ignition.
So in that case, low E coating could be really helpful.
But a low E coating would also reduce the amount of heat that makes it to the interior of the window itself.
Right.
That airspace and the pane behind it.
So if we're dealing with double pane windows or triple pane windows, if you have a low E on surface.
Two, so the inside of the outer pain, that a lot of that radiant heat is going to be reflected back and it's not going to affect the unit as much.
It's not going to affect the middle pain or the inner pain.
And maybe those airspaces also don't, you know, don't.
They don't see the same heat increase as a result.
And the Americans found that effect was actually enough.
Like, I mean, low E is there to stop sunlight.
Yeah, you know, you know, a lot hotter.
But I guess, you know, the Americans found there was enough effect or.
Or some.
Some effect.
Sure, yeah, definitely.
Because it's all radiant heat, like sun.
The sun is actually pretty hot.
It's a lot hotter than a fire to go through.
But, yeah, yeah, yeah, we don't see that heat.
But the radiant heat is radiant heat.
And so if it reflects 70% of radiant heat, it reflects it no matter where that source is coming from.
So, yeah, so it has proven to be effective.
Is it what makes the difference between a window failing and not?
Probably not right now.
It's the pain is going to break first or the frame is going to fail and the low E is probably not what's determining that.
But what I would like.
And if I'm designing a window.
You.
Assume your outer pain is likely sacrificial.
It's going to break in a wildfire.
It's probably going to break in this test that we're doing.
But if it can hang in there, it'll protect the pains on the inside.
And if it's got a lowy coating on it, even if it's cracked, the lowy coating doesn't care, and it's still going to continue to reflect that radiant heat.
And you're relying on that outer pain from, you know, being intact and reducing the heat load on your inner panes so that they can stay strong and maybe they won't break.
Maybe you get to the third pane, third interior pain, and.
And it's fine.
And then you don't have heat or smoke or embers getting into your building.
And then the fires pass, and then you're okay.
So this sounds like triples would be even better.
Triples are better than doubles.
Doubles are certainly better than singles.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Every time you add a pain, you enhance the resistance.
And that's.
There's research done on that in the States.
It also only makes sense, right?
Like, it's just.
It just has more to go through, essentially make your wall thicker.
It's going take longer for heat to get through.
That's.
That's insulation.
But.
Yeah, but it shows.
And we've seen it in testing that we've already done.
Quite often the pain will break, but it'll hang in there.
And this is why we want to see a frame that can, you know, withstand a certain amount of heat, because if that pain hangs in there, it reflects a lot of that heat back away.
And then the inner panes are a bit protected.
And there was a story in the presentation about, I believe it was somewhere in California wanting tempered one tempered light in their wildfire standard.
Is that a thing?
Does that even make any sense?
Yeah.
So in the California building code, you have to.
The prescriptive workaround to this performance test that we've been talking about, the SFM standard, the prescriptive workaround is minimum double pain with minimum one tempered pain.
It can be.
It doesn't have to be the exterior pain.
It could be the interior pain.
I think the exterior pain makes more sense.
I think you.
It'll resist the heat but longer.
But as we know, tempered resists heat a lot longer, and it resists impact much better.
You know, to the tune of.
I think it's four times more heat resistant than float glass.
So it'll take longer to break for sure.
And so that's the prescriptive workaround.
In California, the ibhs, which is the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety in the US which is a large nonprofit organisation, does a lot of research.
They've come out with new requirements for windows that says minimum two tempered panes.
And that's from a lot of testing that they did everyone's fines and this was in the S134 testing done a long time ago too, that the pains are the, usually the element that fail first in these tests.
And the frame is usually okay.
I think that depends on the type of frame you have.
And I think that there is a, you know, we want to check out certain vulnerabilities in certain types of frames, especially vinyl.
But two tempered pains are what is.
Now if you want to get like an insurance premium reduction or deductible reduction, then you have to have two tempered pains in the US and you know, and I've talked to window manufacturers and say, well, if you're tempering one paint, just temper both.
Like it's just, you know, it's just not that big a deal.
Yeah, it wouldn't be.
I don't know if you're always, I don't know, I don't know how great it's always going to look.
Well, I suppose if you get decent tempered.
But it's, yeah, that's, that's a, that, that's another question.
But it's a.
Goes to your, your low E coating question too.
Like, you know, if you're tempering everything, you have to start planning differently for your coatings.
That's right.
For sure.
Yeah, absolutely.
The other thing that I heard happens in the, in the, in the wildfires is you, you actually get a pretty decent wind off of these things and things are blowing around and branches and embers and everything else.
So I guess if we're, you know, if the day comes when we're, when we're getting a Canadian wildfire standard, we're probably going to be looking at some extra, you know, I don't know, hurricane ratings or something like that.
Maybe not that strong, but something like that.
Do you think that'll be part of it?
Yeah, it's interesting, you know, it's not usually mentioned actually.
I think it's not, I think it's not wrong.
Like fires do generate, you know, the fire and Jasper generated hurricane force winds.
That was, that was proven.
So it's a consideration again.
That's why a tempered outer pain would be nice.
It's so much more impact resistant and that's why I think it's not a bad idea to have your outer pain tempered because that's where the impact's going to come from first.
But we have like our standards are pretty good actually for wind and I don't think in most cases that a wildfire is going to generate more wind than you might see at your, our highest design wind temperature or speed.
So our, you know we have good standards in Canada thankfully and, and we've like our A440 standard is, you know, it has certain ratings and requirements for water resistance, durability, wind, et cetera and I think that it's probably substantial enough for, for wildfire in those cases.
If it meets the A440 standard then it'll end and has other wildfire resistant elements.
It's likely enough.
Yeah.
Structural is probably not our biggest issue.
I think it's not though.
I think your point on, on impact is like, for sure, like a branch hitting your window will go through your window.
The trees are falling over.
Yeah, exactly.
Not that you know, you're not going to design a window that's going to withstand too much of that but, but, but there's definitely stuff flying around.
Right.
So you know, I don't, I don't know.
It, it could be, it could be a thing they put in there.
Well and one, one thing that people do often do as a retrofit measure for, you know, is shutters.
And FEMA in the us the Emergency Management Agency, they have recommendations for hurricane shutters but they apply basically equally to a wildfire as long as you're using non combustible materials.
And there are cases, many cases of homes surviving wildfires that had shutters when the home next to them burned down.
There's a very clear case in B.
C.
i won't mention who it is, but the person lost their home and their neighbour was, didn't lose their home but they had wildfire shutters and he thought maybe very likely though the fire actually came through the windows of his building.
Wow.
Yeah.
Well it is a point of vulnerability and it's, it's something, it's something we're going to have to look at.
What, what in your understanding is the status of so, so nr.
NRCAN is, is basically doing consultations right now.
Right.
I mean they, they.
That's, that's as far as anything has gone and you know, who knows what all that'll be.
Right?
That's.
Yeah.
Like what's the, is the, are you, what's the Future of this.
Where are we going comment?
They're not even seeking comment yet because they don't even have a proposal.
Right?
Yeah, I guess that's kind of true.
I think what they're trying to do is understand, you know, like window manufacturers have a really good understanding of how Windows perform.
And so what I think NRCAN is trying to do right now is seek input from window manufacturers.
What do you think about a Wildfire, some sort of Wildfire performance for Windows?
How doable is that?
I think a lot of window manufacturers intuitively know what could potentially work and how much that's going to be to implement on their side of things.
And so the question is like it's sort of, I think more trying to get, to get buy in and just input generally like how hard is this for the industry?
If we now start designing for Wildfire, what would a Wildfire window look like in Canada?
Right.
Is anybody want to take that on?
I mean we were talking about, you know, opportunities for contractors.
Is this an opportunity for a window manufacturer have a Wildfire window in Canada?
I don't know.
It can't hurt.
Especially if the insurance companies are going to take note at all.
Would be.
That would be a, that would be a major bonus.
But like you say, you know, places like Jasper and you know anywhere around there, the municipalities are going to start asking for it, they're going to buy lot.
Right.
You might as well have a product to sell them if you're going into these regions at all.
Robin, unbelievably informative stuff.
Thanks a lot.
What a neat discussion.
And I think I'm going to try to take this up on the commercial side maybe at Top Glass west in Calgary because that's a good obviously the right part of the world.
I think there could be another discussion there on the commercial build side of things as well.
But anyways, thanks so much for bringing us up to speed on all of this.
Where can people find you if they want to ask you questions about this stuff?
Absolutely.
Yeah.
And I really appreciate being on here.
Really interesting conversation.
RDH building science.
We do a lot of work in this field.
Enclosures generally.
You can find me at my email is R u R Q u dash A R T D h dot com or just search my name.
Robin Urquhart, RDH and yeah I'd be happy to answer questions or anything else that people think is interesting in this space.
I'm always happy to talk about it.
Robin, thanks so much for joining us.
Okay, thanks a lot Patrick.
Take care.
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