[Strawbale] Strawbale passes fire tests!

[billc]

Hi folks,

It's my pleasure to announce that plastered strawbale walls have just 
passed two important fire tests.

Two walls were constructed at a building materials testing lab in San 
Antonio earlier this summer - one was built with poly-tied bales on 
edge and covered with two coats of hand-troweled cement/lime plaster 
over stucco mesh, intended to approximate an infill wall in a 
commercial or institutional (or residential) setting.  The second 
wall was stacked flat, put under 600 pound per linear foot load, and 
shot with two coats of clay plaster, approximating loadbearing 
residential construction. No mesh was used on this wall.

The cement/lime plastered wall easily passed the ASTM E-119 2-hour 
fire and hose stream test.  Lab personel told us they felt it 
probably would have made another hour easily.

Due to some cracking on the exterior (non-fire) side of the clay 
plastered wall which occurred while moving the wall up to the 
furnace, and having seen the fire side plaster on the cement/lime 
wall basically being held on only by the wire mesh for the majority 
of the second hour, and considering that a 2 hour rating is rarely 
required for residential construction, we chose to do the clay 
plastered wall for just a one hour test.  It too passed.

The official test reports will be available in about two weeks on the 
ecobuildnetwork.org and DCAT.net websites.  They will also be 
included in the appendix of Bruce King's forthcoming book, 'Design of 
Plastered Straw Bale Structures' (due out in time for the ISBBC in 
Ontario in late September).

Next time some insurance company gives you a hard time about 
strawbale being a fire hazard, you have an answer for them.

Congrats to the team: Bruce King, David Eisenberg, Matts Myrhman, Ben 
Obregon, Frank Meyer, Kindra Welsh, Baron Cougar, Mike Atkinson, Paul 
Taylor, and yours truly.

Thanks also to CASBA, COSBA, SBAT, and the individual donors for 
their financial contributions, as well as to whatever foundation it 
was that Bruce King managed to get the grant from.



-- 
Bill Christensen
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