Welcome back to The Burn, Beyond Firestop. I’m still your host John Zalepka. If you don’t know, this show is dedicated to life safety. So I’m on a mission to find the most interesting people in the space to get their unique perspectives. Now you can usually find me training people so that they…

All vision glass curtain walls are becoming more popular as architects are designing these walls to provide a modern and open concept for buildings. These buildings are aesthetically pleasing and result in unique and upscale designs. The difficulty firestopping all vision glass walls is there rarely is an area to properly install the firestop system and prevent it from being visible…

Welcome to The Burn, Beyond Firestop. I’m your host, John Zalepka. Since this show is focused on life safety, I’m on a mission to find the most interesting people in this space to get their unique perspectives. As the training and development manager at STI, it’s part of my job to help people understand how…

The Burn: Beyond Firestop Hosted by John Zalepka Intro Welcome to The Burn, Beyond Firestop. This is a podcast where I will be interviewing interesting people involved in construction to get their unique perspectives. I’m going to be using my experience as the training and development manager, to help our audience walk away with an…

The Burn takes a dive into the life safety and code requirements for compliance in modern construction. If you’ve ever wondered what it takes to design, build or erect a super tall, or how manufacturers test their products to meet codes and standards… then you’ve come to the right place. We are going to be…

Fire-rated construction joints between rated floors and rated walls (Floor-to-Wall) and joints between two rated floors (Floor-to-Floor) are common applications on commercial construction projects. At STI we have numerous product options that can address various joint widths and hourly ratings for these applications. When searching Floor-to-Floor and Floor-to-Wall joints on The System Search & Submittal Builder on the website you will see the choices shown in Figure 1. You may notice that concrete over…

The requirements for firestopping are driven by the model building codes. The specific language within the relevant codes informs building owners, design professionals, inspectors, and contractors what steps must be taken to make a building safe for occupants in terms of fire safety. However, there are several important codes and they are hundreds if not thousands of pages long. Is there an easy way…

Location, location, location! Great success can come from having a good understanding of location. All aspects of construction rely on information based on location to accomplish a project. In facilities such as hospitals and other healthcare settings, location can mean life or death. Specifically on construction sites, location is found on floor plans (or 3D models) where every trade needs to use as…

One of the more esoteric aspects of fire testing must be the hose stream requirements. Anyone who has witnessed the hose stream component of a fire test has an appreciation of how very dramatic the assault of pressurized water can be on a test specimen. The hose stream is usually the most difficult step in validating the performance of a firestop. Unfortunately,…