We’ve all thrown stuff – glass bottles, cans, wet wood of uncertain origin, and more – into bonfires just to see how well it will burn. Apparently unable to resist this almost primal urge, Matt Risinger of the Build Show recently put a few deck-board samples to the flame test and captured the results on video. Says Risinger, “I’ve heard for years that ipe won’t burn. I also know that Azek has a class A fire rating … In this backyard test, I’m going to see how Azek, cedar, ipe, and TimberTech fare with various degrees of heat and fire!” Burning stuff up can be fun … as long as it’s easy to douse the flames.
In his video, Risinger touches on a related topic – heat gain in decking when exposed to a heat source. I’m not sure that his take on thermodynamics is quite right in this particular instance; fortunately, the question he raises – which types of decking will stay cooler under the hot sun – is tackled in a more systematic way by Jim Finlay, of Boston Decks and Porches. Finlay actually exposed dozens of composite, PVC, and wood decking samples to sunlight exposure and measured the results with an IR thermometer, which he summarizes in a blog post on his website.
Finally, while the results of Risinger’s testing are interesting, they’re not conclusive. As anyone who has performed similar unscientific burn tests around a campfire can attest, pretty much anything will burn if the fire is hot enough and the exposure is long enough. For a closer look at how decking is actually fire-rating tested, check out Steve Quarles’ Q&A about fire-resistant decks, published in PDB a couple of years ago. And back in 2007, California builder Bill Bolton explained how he tackled deck construction in that state’s wildland-urban interface, in his classic PDB article Decks in the Line of Fire. With the climate growing hotter, it’s likely that we will continue to see more wildfires like the one that recently devastated Paradise, California.
