What Is Fire-Rated Plywood?
Fire-rated plywood is specialty plywood that was made by pressure-infusing plywood with flame-retardant chemicals. This helps prevent plywood from burning when it comes into contact with fire. This makes it a safer type of wood to use in home structures and backboarding.
In many projects involving the structural integrity of a home, plywood is the common go-to. It’s cheap, it’s sturdy, and it doesn’t have to be visible to the naked eye. Unfortunately, like most other types of wood-based building materials, plywood burns. To make it more heat-resistant and flame-retardant, builders use a special chemical treatment to make plywood fire-rated.
This is a material that is meant to help you avoid the spread of fire, should a fire break out in your home. Fire safety experts agree it’s a great way to help make your home more fireproof. With that said, the purpose of this plywood is to help prevent the spread of fire. It’s not going to be totally inflammable.
To be considered fire-rated, the following things have to be true about the plywood in question:
The plywood needs to be made with fire-resistant chemicals. Sorry! There’s no such thing as natural fire-rated plywood.
The plywood has to have a Fire Spread Index rating under 25. This means that it officially is a slow-spreading type of wood.
When the test extends beyond 20 minutes, the fire can’t show signs of combustion. In other words, the plywood has to keep its cool, even after most fire tests would call it quits.
The fire also cannot spread more than 10.5 feet beyond the center of the flame at any point of the test. If you can’t tell, this means that the material is meant to be exceptionally slow-burning compared to most other woods.
