Meet FireblockWall
You’re invited to meet FireblockWall™ , the first reusable one-hour fire-rated containment that installs faster than traditional methods and pays for itself in 3-5 uses.
Discover how our newest modular wall system:·
Stops fire
Meets ICRA Class IV & Class V standards
Exceeds ASTM E119 and ASTM E84 requirements
Reduces construction noise (with an STC rating of 40)
Contains the spread of dangerous construction dust
Promotes a higher standard of patient, clinician and employee satisfaction
This innovative product installs four times faster than traditional drywall and offers superior durability, flexibility, and noise reduction. Fireblock Wall is engineered to create safe negative air spaces and meets stringent fire safety standards, making it ideal for renovation projects. The system is reusable, cost-effective, and minimizes disruption for patients and staff. Attendees had the opportunity to ask questions, further exploring the product's features and installation process.
Full Webinar Transcript
For those who prefer text, we've included the complete webinar transcript below. Use it to quickly find topics covered in the presentation and reference important details shared by our speakers.
Welcome everyone. Thank you for joining us for today's webinar, Meet FireblockWall. My name is Jennifer Crosby with STARC Systems and I will serve as your moderator.
A couple of housekeeping items before we begin. Today's presentation is being recorded. If you have any questions during the presentation, please type them into the question box in your GoToWebinar control panel. We will save time for questions at the end of the presentation.
Now I would like to introduce you to today's presenter, Bruce Bickford, vice president of product development with STARC Systems, to get started.
Hey, everybody. Thanks, everybody, for making the time to learn more about our latest innovative containment solution we call FireblockWall. It's the only reusable modular fire rated temporary containment, and it's four times faster to install than drywall.
STARC Systems was developed around real world needs of a contractor, and we chose a name that speaks to the goals of the product, simple telescopic airtight reusable containment.
And along the way, we've developed a full range of products to meet your needs for containment and isolation from the light and fast LiteBarrier product to our flagship RealWall, and now our one hour rated FireblockWall.
All have been engineered for maximum flexibility, ease and clean installation, adaptability to all your situations, great durability, all backed by our multi year warranties.
And everything we offer superior negative air and fire performance.
STARC's modular FireblockWall offers unmatched benefits when compared to traditional drywall.
It's at least four times faster to install. That means no taping, modding, sanding, and painting, and less coordinating to the various trades. Plus, it can be installed and removed during normal business hours.
Superior noise blocking with an SDC rating of forty, which means less disruption for patients, visitors, and staff.
Exceptionally stable and looks and feels like a real wall when it's finished.
It's extremely durable and can be used on job after job after job.
Because it's reusable and so durable, it typically pays for itself after just three to five uses and then generates ongoing cost savings and revenue.
It looks great, blends into the existing health care environment while hiding the disruption of renovations.
And it exceeds both ICRA class five and ESTM eighty four requirements.
When our we consider the requirements for the health care environment, the FireblockWall development had been focused specifically to meet all the necessary requirements to be listed as a one hour rated assembly while also meeting the ICRA 2.0 requirements.
These requirements include the fire barrier test wall standard ASTM e one one nine, which is part of NFPA two forty one, ASTM e eighty four for flame and spread flame spread and smoke generation, class a, as well as ICRA standards for cleanliness, negative air performance, and sound attenuation.
Shown on the left side of this hallway is a firewall installation. You can see how it blends right into the existing environment, eliminating the disruption of renovation.
All of our development certification work has been done through Intertek at multiple locations around the country. The wall system and cap have been tested to the latest additions of the e one one nine and e eighty four ratings, and the door and door frame is sep separately listed under UL ten c one hour.
These listings are all available and published through the Spec Direct website.
In California, we've have seismic preapproval, OPM, number o six four two, and have approval from the fire life safety group at HCAI for installation of the system when following the normal plans review process.
The California State Fire Marshal's Office has also approved FireblockWall under their building materials listing program.
Here's a high level overview of how our system works. It's a simple, flexible design which begins with a series of perimeter tracks mounted to the floor, wall, and ceiling or soffit.
The modular panels then sit inside the tracks using the lift and drop connection method without tools or extra hardware.
Additional modules such as corners, doors, and air management panels round out the system to create the one hour rated assembly.
So we're gonna show a quick video of how this, gets set up.
The steps to install FireblockWall are as follows: unpack materials, mark center line on floors, walls and ceilings, Install soffit track base angles.
Place floor tracks reflecting soffit track centerline secure to floor if necessary.
Mount wall track base angles nestled within soffit and floor tracks.
All tracks feature snip cut details to be easily cut to length.
Install panels beginning with a corner. Panels feature lift and drop connections for easy assembly.
Install door and other components.
Pack soffit and wall tracks with fire block pillows.
Install covers beginning with wall tracks and ending with soffit tracks.
Tracks.
The, FireblockWall panels are the centerpiece for the solution.
They come in a variety of widths and heights to accommodate eight foot to ten foot ceilings and will solve virtually any job requirement. Our panel widths are six, twelve, and twenty four inches, and we use six inch or twelve inch extension panels at for height as needed.
Each panel features rugged galvanized steel construction front and back for superior durability, a proprietary core insulation package for thermal barrier, and and it blocks noise.
Each features our fast and simple lift and drop connection for quick setup and takedown.
The front face features a durable, clean, white powdered coating that looks great in health care environment and is easily cleanable and hides any disruption.
All of our panels and modules utilize a tongue and groove connection design that forms an airtight seal that exceeds ICRA class five.
The system has been optimized for installation in eight foot, nine foot, and ten foot ceilings. We accomplished by using two different panel heights of ninety two and one hundred and four inches, adding six inch and twelve inch height extensions as needed.
Then our top track for the ceiling or soffit of eleven inches allows up to six inches of final adjustment.
With this flexibility, we can accommodate any floor plan and height requirement between ninety five and a hundred and twenty five inches The perimeter tracks are really the key to our adaptability, reusability, and flexibility of the system. We've patented a telescoping set of tracks to provide the ability to fit any dimension by both sliding the two components together and also through our innovative snip cut process whereby the steel tracks are laser perforated.
So that with tin snips, you can just cut the edges of the track then simply flex it until it breaks apart.
All the pieces can be reassembled and used in the telescoping track section so that the entire system is a hundred percent reusable for the next installation.
The depth of the tracks for both walls and ceiling allow that last six inches of adjustability, allowing you to achieve any floor plan or ceiling height covered.
To finish off the wall and soffit, track covers are installed to close-up the cavity and support the wall.
By design, there's always gonna be a small gap between the sides between the panel and wall and the tops between the panel top and the ceiling or soffit to allow adjustment for positioning of the panels.
To meet our fire listing, we used this we've created a sealed indumescent pillow to fill the gap between the panel edges and the wall or ceiling.
We developed our own pillow product similar to those you may have seen from three m or Hilti that has an intumescent layers and expands to fill the void in a fire.
The installer simply drops the pillows into the gap loosely and fits the covers on the tracks to close-up the wall assembly. That's it.
No loose insulation is used or any dust created.
If you need to cut one to length, you use just use a knife and then tape it up the end tape up the end, saving the remainder for use next time.
All of our pillows are a hundred percent reusable, so it will last the lifetime of the system.
Our corner modules use the same lift and drop method with a tongue and groove joint, are available in ninety and hundred and thirty five degree angles, and fit the ceiling height range with two different basic heights of ninety two and one zero four. We also offer the height extensions for these as well.
Like everything else, the corners, of course, are a hundred percent reusable.
STARC has always been focused on creating safe negative air spaces for the health care setting, and FireblockWall provides the same tools as our other products.
A negative air discharge panel, shown on the left, features a twelve inch diameter duct collar for connection to a HEPA machine or discharge and to discharge the air into the clean side.
The flat panel diffuser on the front only discharges air upward and sideways along the plane of the wall to limit disturbing dangerous dust on the floor.
In testing, we've demonstrated the negative air performance of the FireblockWall system of greater than point zero eight inches of water negative pressure.
Integral, with this ducted, the six is twelve inch diameter duct, we offer a couple of options. One is, a mechanical fire damper, with a hundred and sixty five degree fusible link, to have that thermal basic thermal fire protection, or we can offer a fire smoke damper with a motorized, damper assembly in it. This can be also connected to a local smoke head relay base or optionally to the building's fire alarm system, for actuation.
All of our installations, really should require or should have a air monitoring panel as well. So these installations typically have a negative air pressure level recorded.
We do that with our air monitor panel, which incorporates a mounting location for a digital recording differential pressure monitor.
And that also this panel and fire block also includes a fire rated wire pass through for the pressure tube and power cable.
So typically, we locate this panel adjacent to a door or in a location that's convenient to the infection prevention folks on their rounds.
Our fire door module is fully compliant listed under UL ten c with a one hour rating. We've integrated a standard bidirectional door buck into our tongue and groove modular frame as one welded unit and then mount a stock steel fire door fitted into that frame.
Both are tagged and listed separately as eval ten c one hour.
The doors include standard heavy duty hinges, three hour rated hardware, including a closer, therefore meeting all code requirements.
The door itself, is a three six six eight door allowing thirty nine by seventy nine inch open clearance.
The module includes the tongue and groove lift and drop interface.
It the the door's module is forty eight inches wide and either ninety two or one zero four tall, and we include the height extensions for those as well.
And we're well aware of the various requirements that different facilities have for access control. It's a big topic we talk about all the time. And so we have standard options for the fire door assembly for either six or seven pin key locks in our lever handers level lever handles, or we offer both mechanical or electronic keypads, with key overrides.
We also have a crash door bar option, and we have, we can customize the doors for card readers.
All of our hardware can also be configured for small or large format interchangeable cores or best cores.
During the, design of the system, expressly, we've designed the system to be certified as a one hour fire barrier assembly per code.
And so when mounted against other one hour rated assemblies.
For the typical building arrangement, what this means is that the soffit track is mounted to the underside of a one hour rated soffit that's built to the deck and through all the utilities above the ceiling. Alternatively, the soffit track could be mounted to a hard rated hard lid ceiling, so a drywall ceiling, or a rated one hour rated grid tile system.
The detail here in the graphic shows the track mounted to the soffit and the use of the pillows to fill the void between the panel and track. Recognizing that that's a pretty difficult situation in most facilities and in the difficulties they're in in building a soffit above the ceiling, we've created a rated lid accessory, to mount to the top for our walls, which we call fire block cap.
Our customers have told us that they either don't wanna go to or through the ceiling or they just need to maintain the rating of the wall during renovation.
So we created this cap accessory for FireblockWall.
FireblockWall cap creates a fast, clean, simple, one hour rated fire containment that when installed in a matter of hours with no disruption along a rated wall. With a door and negative air capability, these wall systems can serve as a rated anteroom or just a working space to penetrate or protect the adjacent wall as needed.
With the speed of these assemblies that can be installed and removed, you can save weeks of time in your phasing plans, work during normal hours in a busy facility with only one trade, and have no demolition waste from the containment.
And like the rest of the system, they're compliant with ICRA 2.0 while being fully reusable, rugged, and durable.
Then there's applications where the cap may not work or be suitable. We've designed a system to allow for alternative means of compliance, which is a code term.
When FireblockWall is installed as a fire partition, our soffit track has been engineered to be mounted to a standard grid system using a custom grid clips and a bracing system to carry the seismic or track loads.
This bracing system is also approved for California under the HCAI OPM.
Your ILSM, AHJ, or inspector may allow this type of installation based on the spaces being separated, the duration of the project, the use of fire watch, or other factors, that are appropriate for your facility.
So, here's how we ship our systems.
They're all designed for maximum protection, minimal dunnage, and reusability.
We're big on staying sustainable, and so our packaging methods, follow that idea.
FireblockWall is shipped in dedicated skids to the job site where the panels and accessories can be then loaded onto our carts for transport inside the facility.
We use non marking foam pads to separate panels that are reusable and help protect the painted surfaces.
And due to LTL regulations, most of our shipments are made on dedicated trucks with the added benefit of limiting transit damage.
STARC is a company that was founded on customer support as evidenced by our reorder rate of over ninety percent.
For the Fireblocks system, we're here to make you as successful from the first conversation to the completion of your first installation and everyone thereafter.
Simply provide us with a project plan PDF that details your phases and measurements for the temporary containment, and we'll provide and return a FireblockWall layout as such as shown here on the right in either Bluebeam or Revit format and return it to you along with the materials take off and estimate for your demolition plan and review process.
We can do that every time, for you going forward as well.
So let's talk about some installations we've done recently.
Here's a soffit install at Aurora Health in Chicago. It's a simple l shaped fire barrier, one hour rated fire barrier to the soffit, installed their very first time in a couple of hours by two guys.
Here's a, sterilization facility in a Connecticut hospital.
Major renovation project going on, in in that facility adjacent to it. So put up about a hundred fifty feet of FireblockWall with numerous jogs and and angles and other things around that space. It was sort of a big u shaped plan.
It provided a dustless installation, in a matter of a couple of days, with three people.
So by, again, about a hundred and fifty feet.
Another project, a a nurse's station inside a linear accelerator facility, in California, just to the ceiling. They have a temporary approval for this, just going to the ceiling.
And, again, fairly quickly, the walls were put up in about a day, by a small crew, and and, around that space.
Installation in Florida.
This was pair of corridor kits installed to create a means of egress out of an occupied space through a construction zone. They framed the soffit up to the deck, and then installed the FireblockWalls before the final sheetrock and fire caulking went in place.
They did this first wall in about an hour, their very first time, with a team of three, and the second was second wall, for this space was installed about an hour or two people.
Very happy with the system.
And finally, another quick install. We do a lot of corridor kits, simple eight foot wide protection that we're dividing a space or dividing a hallway. And so you see an air panel, air air monitor panel on the right, a door, and a couple of panels to the left. And this is before the installation was finished up. In that left hand picture, you can see, the Fireblock pillows in place before that cover was put on.
So here's a chart to show you a little bit, in rough terms about cost savings for our system.
This is a directional directionality cost analysis, not meant to be exactly per your situation, obviously.
But comparing a hundred feet of drywall built with a soffit to the deck, versus a hundred feet of FireblockWall with cap, showing the material savings breakdown after two installations and a substantial labor savings after the very first install.
These numbers are based on contractor supply data, but and also highlight the speed at which FireblockWall and cap can be set up and removed.
So, again, just a directional, analysis.
So, we can take some questions.
Great. Thank you, Bruce. Yes. We will go ahead and take some time for questions now. As a reminder, please be sure to type any questions into the question box in your control panel. We did have a question that came in pretty early. Bruce, can you provide a bit of clarification on customer supplied soffit?
Sure.
Again, the soffit that we're talking about is a, a rated assembly, that gets built from the ceiling plane up to the deck and would require, therefore, the the code required construction method.
And any penetrations would then have to be fire caulked and rated as well. So it's again, it's a fairly conventional above the ceiling type of construction, which we all recognize is fairly difficult.
A question just came in from Maxine. If this isn't an atrium, do you have a ceiling?
Not at this time. We just have the cap, which is really limited right now to a two foot wide enclosure.
What is the turnaround time from the time a PO is issued to shipping from your facility?
We maintain a fairly large, supermarket, which is what we call our inventory within the warehouse. So we're able to quick ship, smaller orders, you typically less than a hundred feet, within a couple of days.
Couple of questions have come in, about the cap. How big an enclosure can I build with the cap?
So listening to customers during the development process, most people had a concern about their remaining corridor widths. So if if they were going to install FireblockWall down the hallway, to be able to work on a set of rooms or are the walls in a corridor, they needed to preserve, that six foot minimum, which in most states is required.
So we chose to limit the cap to, two feet wide.
And so, therefore, you have a twenty inch working space inside the the room.
However, the cap can be built as long as you want down the hall. There's no limitation on the length that you go down the hall. And, currently, we offer, ninety degree corners at both ends. So what we call just sort of a u shaped enclosure.
And can I use the cap for a tunnel?
Not at this time. Again, we require it to be rated, up against a rated wall, as as sort of that fourth side of the of the enclosure.
As an owner as an owner's rep slash project manager representing health systems, do you sell direct or are there certain distributors and or contractors that you need to purchase from assuming the internal facilities department could handle the install?
We sell direct to facilities. We sell direct to contractors. We do not have any, distributors right now for Fireblock.
Also, can your panels be cut or notched without impacting the rating or once it is cut, would the fire rating be negated once it has been cut?
Our panels, have to be maintained as a as shipped. So if you do cut them or try to modify them, it would, negate the rating. So what we recommend is that there, you know, if you need to, go around something, say, an obstruction on the wall or the ceiling, that you build a small drywall assembly, to carry to, manage that exception and then, butt up the, FireblockWall system on either side.
Great. If the project team is concerned about AHJ requirements for temporary occupancy, is there a way that ILSM or methods of procedure can be used to increase AHJ confidence?
Yeah. We could talk with you about that, your specific situation, but, you know, we have explored a lot of different options, for, the ILSM situation, and for temporary. Again, alternative means compliance, and we've got a lot of background in that and certainly can help you out. There's, it depends on your jurisdiction, your your state location about what's typically allowed.
And we do with our approvals and our, increasing awareness of the, capabilities of the system, we are getting more confidence in the regulatory community about what we can support and what's possible with our system.
And of course there's always, you know, short term temporary situations are often easier to handle as well.
Can the system be used in a non rated application with the advantage being reduced sound transmission?
Yes. Of course. The STC of forty provides a substantial amount of sound reduction that we currently sell systems for just that application, just for sound attenuation.
And who would I speak to about getting a quote for FireblockWall?
You would contact our sales department directly, either through the website or or phone messaging, and, they'll help you out.
I'm just gonna give it another minute to see if any more questions come in.
Well, thanks everyone for submitting so many great questions. A recording from today's webinar will be available soon. We wanna thank you again for joining us today. We appreciate you being here, and we hope you have a great day.
Thanks, everybody.
