The very thought of fire breaking out in our homes fills our minds with panic and fear. We start imagining about smoke, property-loss, unbearable heat and last but not the least, the loss of lives. Your insurance company will give you the money to regain all the material goods but what about the lives lost? There are certain things that money cannot replace. Fire accidents may occur in your home or office without any prior warning. So, the only way to protect your living place is to use fire protective coatings.
Regular paints can save your walls from corrosion & can be used to decorate them but when it comes to dealing with fire, such paints are flammable & aggravate the fire. Here arises the need of fire retardant coatings that can resist the spread of fire & protect the building’s structure from any sort of permanent damage.
A fire resistant paint is specifically made that can delay the spread of fire & resists its further expansion. However, it should be noted that no substance is entirely incombustible. Fire resistance paints cannot extinguish fire, they just prevent fire & protect the surfaces on which the paint is applied.
Such paints are in-tumescent that means they swell up when they are exposed to comparatively higher temperatures and increase in volume, in turn, decreasing the density. The swelled up paint forms an insulating substance known as ‘char’ which is a poor conductor of heat. This gives more time to fire- fighters to take complete control of the fire.
These paints come with a fire resistance rating that explains how long that particular fire resistant paint would withstand fire.
When it comes in contact with heat, this paint increases its volume from 200 to 300 times that, in turn, forms the insulating layer & delays the ignition temperature of the substance. Though paints are basically used to decorate the walls of a home but these paints serve an additional purpose of providing protection to your walls. These paints can be rolled, sprayed or brushed on just like any other traditional paint.
The fire retardant paints were first used in 1950s but they were quite expensive, difficult to use, used to create undesirable smoke and comprised of carcinogen which is quite harmful for the people who came in contact with them. Later in 1980’s, in-tumescent paints were introduced that were far better than their predecessors and safe to use as they did not contain any carcinogen.