Taming the Flame

Episode 7: Fireproof House
The Challenge: Protect a home from radiant heat from a forest fire and the flames themselves.

The Material: Nanogel, a cutting-edge insulating material, also known as “frozen smoke.” Supplied in granular form, it is a lightweight solid that flows like water and is often used in green building construction. It is the only insulator better than air, but how will the team harness it for this challenge?

What to Watch For: The heat that the team has to create -- 500-600 degree F radiant heat that preheats a wooden home almost to its ignition temperature, followed by 2,000-degree F flames that instantly ignite it.

When to Watch: Wednesday, Feb. 20, at 10 p.m. ET/PT. Get a reminder.

What You Missed: Be sure to read Deanne’s behind-the-scenes calculations from High Rise Escape-- The Magnetic Pull of Experimentation.

Photos: AP

Comments

[Jack]

Interesting challenge, but this time even the cast agrees it was poorly met. I think they missed the Point ... The protection "package" doesn't need to be stored locally or deploy automatically. It needs to be able to be deployed in the path of the fire by competent fire fighting personnel. The home owners would have long since been evacuated. It would also need to fit a variety of building designs and sizes. The Carbon-X cloth is an interesting choice ... but they should take a hint from the industries that deal with these design problems everyday, and stick to the "Fumigation bag" technique. (No Seams) Also aerogel has some great properties but doesn't readily lend itself to packing into pockets without gaps and still remaining flexible enough to deploy. There is a different material that combined with the "bag" approach would actually pass this challenge. Interestingly enough it's another gel but this ones special property is to hold many times it's own weight in water and not give that water up to heat without a fight. It could be easily mixed into a light weight rock wool filler fabric and sewn into overlapping strips on the outside of the carbon-x bag. Then as the fire approached, the firefighters would simply thoroughly hose down the bags and move up the row and towards safety. This approach could also be used to construct emergency "tents" that could protect whole firefighting crews in the event of sudden wind changes. The stored bags would have relatively low weight ... but once deployed the "rock-wool" layer could be discarded ... the Carbon-x bag would in fact be reusable. The gel I speak of is a variation of the same one used in disposable diapers ... and it costs a heck of a lot less than aerogel. I may not agree with the mindless complainers like Howie that just like to hear themselves ... but a valid point is a valid point ... if a solution can't be used in real life; why bother

[Frank]

Did anyone catch that they melted a penny on the show. Last time I checked it was Illegal to do so. I am disappointed in this show. I agree "Please hire a REAL engineer." and fire your current one. I cant believe he can call himself an engineer seams like these guys just spend money and don't make anything that works. Their ideas are not plausible in real life. I am done with this show.

[Tom]

I agree that a dome type structure would be better there would be no seems to catch fire and the pivot point should have been in the center of the structure then you wouldnt have had the seams. Then as the other guy wrote spray it with a fire retardant on top. I dont know real estate in Califoria but if 50.000 is all it will add I think that most homeowners wont even blink about that small amount.

[Brent]

I too am not surprised they didn't try to build a fifty foot tall fire extinguisher. I wish I could get the hour of my life back that I wasted watching this show.

[ian]

why not put the material that you have made under the siding of the house. then all you would need to do is cover the windows and doors. wouldnt that be a lot easier. and i know that people would have to get out of the house so make the fire escapes easy to get out of or make them so the fire escapes are manual as opposed to automatic. try an episode with that

[Dave]

haha they just said only fools would do this in the forest, so they are going into the desert. wouldnt these tools be going to the forest?

[dave]

also, as an addition to my last comment... wouldnt an integral calculation in this project be figuring out how much the aerogel weighed, then MULTIPLYING that number by the amount of aerogel the sheet can hold to determine the exact final weight instead of guessing it will be light, simply because the substance is light in small quantities.

[Josh]

I wish this show was never created. It pains me to know that somebody thought the show was good enough to spend money to produce and put on national television.

[james]

im with the people who think this is a joke! the whole idea of putting this massive "tent"for your house in the ground is hilarious! it would obviously have to work on some power source!what happens if the fire takes out the power miles before it reaches your house?how bout this?if you guys just have to use the "carbonex" why not use it to make a composite material and fashion it into siding, and since aerogel seems to already be available as a "painted on"substance just paint it on the structure underneath!then all you have to worry about is the windows and doors which would be easy to protect with the same materials! remember the acronym K.I.S.S.?why do we have to make some big overpriced behemoth of a contraption that would destroy the looks of your property and probably wouldnt save your house anyways?keep it simple stupid!a more practical use for something like this would be to protect vehicles or other machinery that couldnt be moved out of the way in time!and that could be as simple as a car cover made of "carbonex"maybe with a layer of areogel sprayed inside if you wanted.so there... someones gonna get rich off my ideas,and i better get a cut!

[Jeff]

Howie,
Your an idiot!! Heres an idea....if you don't like the show watch something else. Who cares what his credentials are....its for entertainment. I think people like you should have there tvs taken away. Who comes on the website and bags on the actors education????? Its entertainment???? Do you think that these people are the first people to think of fire retardent house????

[james]

one last thing... is it nano-gel,or aerogel?i coulda swore the show called it aerogel,and several other people on here called it aerogel, but the SL site calls it nanogel!

[Fourx4king1]

I wish they would complete their experiments. If they know that the seems were going to fail (fire retardent house show) on the fire retardent blanket they should have put some thought into fixing that.(they said it would fail before the test) They put so much thought into the entire experiment and then little things always cause the experiment to fail. The show has potential but I am getting frustrated with all there failures from little things, like duct taping the air bag to the train. It just seems like they don't take the time to do things all the way through.

[Tim R.]

Smash Lab,

CONGRATULATIONS!

You have now achieved approximately the mix of questions and hate postings you would have found on the Mythbusters board in early 2006!

You don't believe me?? - It's true!

Hyneman and Savage would come on in the end, but instead of "Please visit our site", would make veiled efforts to get the message across to the fans "What the F-- is your problem"???

Kari Byron would make jabs at the fans in her show dialogue.

Imahara didn't even try--

Oh yeah - The bit with the Penny?? It is never going to go away. For about three months there was a group of fans who wanted Imahara hauled out by the ATF for a gun firing model he made on a work bench.

Good luck - And get a moderator for your forum. I think the MB moderator is a bit too restrictive, but there is NO reason you can't pull posts that don't deal directly with show content.

What you have is simply what you are going to get if cyber-beasties think you are vulnerable.

[Matthew Amburg]

I was appalled to see your ACTORS melting a penny without the use of proper safety equipment such as SAFETY GLASSES. I assume this show is watched by many young people who do not know any better and you should be setting a much better example. As for the rest of the show, what a joke. My dead dog could come up with better concepts. When I saw your concept for a system to drape the fire protecting blanket I started laughing and changed the channel. It is a real shame since the materials and show ideas are really cool, they are just not executed well.

[JC]

Tim R, do you work wirh "gifted" chidlren? Because your ability to encourage in the face of failure is unparalleled.

[Truckie]

This show misses in so many ways. They could have explained why the building burst into flames so fast after being heated. There estimate of 50k is rediculous. They don't factor in labor, tool costs, R&D costs, machinery to deploy the shield and transportation among other things. The cost could easily surpase the cost of the house. Then you have to factor how it would be stored and how the environment would cause problems with deployment. There are so many flaws with this design and idea.

And Jack, so your idea is to let the forest fire keep burning and getting bigger so highly trained firefighters can deploy this thing on houses. That is a stupid idea.

If you don't want your house to be blown over in a hurrican then don't build your house on the coast. Likewise people shouldn't build their houses where forest fires occur every year. Problem solved.

[andrew]

I've watched 4 of the smash labs shows. Last night I saw the one where they try and protect a house from wild fires. Very over-engineered system that had tones of problems such as weight, cost, no protection from fires spreading from underground, sparks getting around their protection, deployablity.

I've worked on solving the same problem and came up with a very eligant system using the principle of boiling water in a paper cup. The solution is cheap (less than 1/10 the cost of their system) light, easily deployable, and resistant to one point of failure. (I provide the link below). I've had a flame thrower on my system for well over an hour without burn through (lasted more than just 4 minutes).However as an amateur inventor with very little funds, it is hard to take something like this from concept and prototype, to production. I went crazy seeing all the failure points in the system and was just wishing I had their resources to prove my system...... but that brings about an idea for smash labs...

why don't they take an amateur inventor and try and have their guys work with them to see if their invention works or have them compete to see if the amateur can beat them given the same resources.....

BTW heres the patent office link to my invention....

http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=26&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PG01&s1=koeppen.IN.&OS=IN/koeppen&RS=IN/koeppen

[benracin]

I thought the last show (with the magnets) showed that this show is getting better, but now we're back to the same old bad stuff again.

What disappoints me the most is that these are "experts" and they can never plan or execute a plan correctly. How many shows have we seen where they get to the final experiment and they fail horribly at even putting it together. It's like they never even thought how to put it together. This time they didn't know if they could lift the heavy fabric, they doubted their hydraulics, they had to call in a cherry picker to pull over their flap, they weren't sure how to tie the edges up... on and on and on. If they're engineers wouldn't they have done some calculations? Hey, the tarp weighs this much, my hydraulic piston only lifts this... we've got a problem!

There lack of planning is just wrong. How much money are they spending to basically screw up on national TV at the end and then claim it worked? If my job was to spend days on experiments that only kind of worked, then said lets spend thousands of dollars to build something much bigger, then fail every time, wouldn't I get fired?

My other complaint is that they just never have a control. They blatantly mentioned their control last time to try and address this issue, but once again this show screws it up again. Do we know what the flames at the end did to a non-protected house? Nope. All we know is that a Hollywood pyrotechnics dude said it would burn. I suppose as far as credentials go he's also a "scientist" and an "engineer". Sure the temps were cool. How hot were they on the house without the protection?

Could you just do your "science" right for a change? So a before and after! A non-protected and a protected using the same situations! Sure we saw a house burn at the beginning, but that's not how you did it at the end.

Ugh, this show is horrible.

[Jonny]

After last nights show, I am convinced Chuck is not an engineer, or SO far out of his area of expertise it IS funny.

Loved the way it was overly-complex. That shows a lack of creativity. KISS is hard, no?

Started out as needing 3000 sq. ft. for the average house... Very funny, that makes the average house about, what... 700 sq. ft.?

It makes more sense to apply this like HI-R insulation, under the siding, and cover the doors and windows when needed.

It makes even more sense to clear the brush around your house. This is how the fire crews sometimes determine which houses to save, and is why some houses still stand unscathed while neighbors' homes are smoldering ashes.

Favorite Chuck quote of the show was when they tried to lift it with the hydraulics. It was something like "That SHOULD work." Nothing like not knowing the materials you're working with, Chuck. It's not like you didn't have the weight of everything available to you, and figured in a safety/fudge factor... you know, like if the wind blows into your shield and adds a load.

[Rodney]

Jonny, I transcribed some of that dialogue on Mary's Blog. It might have been Kevin who said "I THINK it's going to work..." Feel free to check it out. Do a search for my name on that page.

I found it disconcerting after googling NANOGEL, that the manufacturer's mentions in (the material's) properties that it is also HYDROPHOBIC. From their website:
"Hydrophobic surface: Nanogel aerogel particles repel water but can be wetted by oleophilic substances such as oils."

Maybe it's me, but that poses a problem. Flame, worst case scenario, that gets past a breach in their fabric design, will be extremely difficult to extinguish. Water is the primary tool to fight a residential wildfire, solely for being more ubiquitous and inexpensive. It irks me that that wasn't discussed on camera as a potential issue during the episode. Could you even tell if there was a fire inside the fabric (with its inherent effectiveness, not to mention that its effectiveness is bi-directional, not linear), and could you fight it without getting close enough (removing the fabric) to get burned? Stuff to consider, that's all.

Source: http://www.cabot-corp.com/cws/functions.nsf/CWSID/cwsFUN200509290842AM9052?OpenDocument&ctM=&ctPF=

r.

[Rodney]

I forgot to mention: With NANOGEL being Hydrophobic, did it look on camera like they were having trouble dousing the flame initially? It seemed like they were having trouble dousing the flames when the shield was still intact.

r.

[jonny]

Yeah, it looked like they had a problem getting the wet stuff on the red stuff... the fire was under the cover. Water doesn't penetrate all that well... which is why a wetting agent is sometimes added to the water. That works great, but you still need to get ENOUGH wet stuff on the red stuff to absorb the heat generated, or the fire grows. Eventually, the fire burns down to where the applied wet stuff can absorb all the heat generated, but that means the fuel is all gone..... which is bad.

[jonny]

I wouldn't want to mount an internal attack on that fire with the shield still intact, which is what I meant.

You'd have to remove the cover, or let it burn off, which is what it looked like happened.

Even if the gel wasn't hydrophobic, you would not be able to apply enough water to quickly knock down the blaze with the cover intact.....

[Tim R.]

Smash Lab,

I haven't watched the complete show yet, as I had to get to sleep early last night for work. It would appear that it is not as polished as the "High Rise Fire Escape", and probably made before this former episode.

I was wondering? - Did you get hit by the writers strike?

That aside:

Don't kid yourselves for a moment - If Mythbusters were to lay an egg, really fumble something badly, or if they simply appeared vulnerable - The VAST majority of the people ranting, "You stink - You're a Mythbusters rip-off"!!, would go RIGHT AFTER the Mythbusters, and tear away at them with utter glee, and no compassion of any kind.

Don't take it personally.

[charles]

I wont even bother posting any criticisms or opinions of the show, they will just be censored and erased. Look at the "magnetic" blog, hundreds of critical and negative comments were removed, and only the 5 or 6 notes that had positive comments were left.