Fire Hardening Follow up: Fact & Fiction Part 1 | Hour 2

do the good kind, uplifting, informative, inspiring. We're on Instagram, TikTok for like Another Day, Facebook X Home with Yeah it's true, TikTok for like another Day, or so I think Home with Dean, same handle for all of them Home with Dean And of course this very program is also the house Whisper podcast that you can listen to anytime, anywhere on demand. We've got hundreds of episodes, all searchable by topic. It is or could be or should be

your home improvement reference library. And if your home is in need of more personal house Whisper attention, by the way, you could book an in home design consult with us, I mean me and t this one right here. All you have to do is go to house Whisper dot Design and yeah, we'll pay you a visit and figure out what's going on with your home, all right, I am approaching this subject of fire hardening specifically this weekend because too much confusion already abounds. But I'm also taking calls.

I'm trying to balance the two. You know, we're kind of in this balancing act right now of a little bit of life returning to normal, but not ignoring the pressing needs a lot of Southern Californians. I would argue all Southern Californians should do some fire hardening work on their home, but there's so many fallacious ideas out there and a lot of ignorance. I'm going to be addressing that specifically in detail on tomorrow's show, on the next episode.

If you're a podcast listener right now, all I'm doing something we haven't done for a while, which is getting some calls handled because you know, I know you've got questions. Life goes on as well, So whether you're called is about fire or whether it's about anything else on your home, feel free to call me eight three three two Ask Dean A three three the numeral to ask Dean. All right, for those of you who are on the edge of

your seat and wondering, is Dean going to answer Peter's question? Uh, my computer is still locked up here, and so you know I'm going to get it fixed. But let me just go ahead and answer the question. So Peter had called and asked, hey, I got I live in an apartment. I got a bunch of stuff plugged in, And I did adequately answer his question in terms of like, hey, you're safe, You're good. You put a power strip into an outlet and you can put a bunch of stuff

on there. And the power strip itself has a breaker mechanism. If it's pulling too much energy through it, it will pop and you'll have to reset it. And that's how you know you get too many things plugged into it. Also, the breaker itself for the circuit of the outlet is set to go off if too much energy gets pulled through the wire that's creating that circuit, And a fifteen am breaker obviously will pop before a twenty am breaker

because that's a bigger line, it's a bigger load. But specifically, what I wanted to do was do a quick search on the internet just to find out. Sometimes, you know, some of the questions I get asked, I'm always curious, like, well, if I did an internet search and just ask a simple question, would I get a straight answer? And it turned out I'm assuming that it might be a tricky answer.

But my computer's locked up right now, and so I can't tell you whether the internet would have answered this well, so I'm just going to do it right here. All right? Are you ready? Are you ready? This is how you very very specifically figure out what you can plug into an outlet at home. As I said, most regular home receptacle circuits are fifteen amp, some of them are twenty amp.

How can you tell at your breaker panel? When you go to your power box and open it up your main panel, you will find the breakers and they will have on them they'll be labeled fifteen twenty. That's how you know fifteen amp circuit, twenty amp circuit and so on. Also here in America we have one hundred and twenty vault power systems. Okay, that's the voltage of our power system. So it's very very simple. All you have to do is multiply the ampridge of a circuit by the voltage

of a circuit. Ampridge times voltage okay equals wattage, and wattage is the power consumption that that circuit is capable of. So case in point, if you take a fifteen amp circuit and multiply it by one and twenty volts, you will find that eighteen hundred watts is the maximum pull of the usage that that circuit will handle at one

moment in time. Okay, So yeah, this this most commonly occurs where like, you're in the bathroom and you've got a fifteen amp circuit right there next to the sink, and a woman has a or I should say woman, I'm just all I'm saying is that's how it works in my household. Tina blow drives your hair, and I do not. Okay, but let's say you've got a blow dryer there. I have a very good friend, by the way, a guy who spends way more time blow drawing his

hair than Tina does. He will remain nameless. But here's the point. You know who I'm talking about fifteen hundred watt blow dryer on a fifteen am circuit. That's fifteen hundred watts out of eighteen hundred watts maximum. So you're only three hundred watts short of that maximum capacity on

that circuit, which is why you're sitting there. Somebody's using a blow drying and then somebody plugs in an electric razor or hair clipper or something else like like that, and boom, off goes the circuit and you're like, what is wrong with this house? Nothing's wrong with the house because you've overloaded the capacity for that. So, Peter, I

hope you're still listening. Just FYI. If you really want to get to persnickety about it, you can basically look at every single thing that you plug in, either the right on the end of the plug or the transformer or somewhere on the device. You're going to find the wattage that it pulls right. And so you add up the watts of this thing and the clock radio and the thing and the thing and the thing, and then you compare that to your fifteen amp circuit eighteen hundred watts.

See what you got left over or whether you go over it or not. Also a twenty amp circuit by that same formula, twenty times one hundred and twenty equals twenty four hundred twenty four hundred wats on a twenty amp circuit, eighteen hundred watts on a fifteen amp circuit, And ideally the electrical code would like you to use only eighty percent of that maximum for ultimate safety. So

there you go. There you have it all right. When we come back, another call or two, and then some thoughts that get us sort of warmed up towards this subject of fact and fiction dispelling for fire hardening your home. You are home with Dean Sharp the house Whisper. Jamfi, Dean Sharp, the house Whisper, at your service. Thanks for joining us on the program this morning. I'm in the middle of taking some calls right now. And yes, you'll be happy to know my computer is back up and running.

I know you were all really really worried about that, so I just want to I just want to bring you that relief. Isn't that good news? All right, let's go back to the phones. I want to talk to Nancy. Hey, Nancy, welcome home.

from the side of the coup? And then how far down does the base need to be attached to the coup? Does that make sense?

suggest you do it. That you that you that you run, you that you build essentially a rectangle of your little two by two material, so that the one side of the rectangle attaches to the coop, the other is sticking out the not quite three feet. You don't want it all the way at the end. You come back in like six inches or so. So let's say if you

if the corrugated material hangs out three feet. Then you know, then your rectangular support for this thing should be maybe two foot six sticking out, okay, And have have a whole edge of wood there on the on the front side of this thing, so it supports that material because it's a little flimsy, okay. And then from there, once you have that whole roof structure, the corrugated material hanging over six inches each end of your wood and six

inches off the front. Then once you attach that to the chicken coop, all you need are a couple of angle pieces down to the chicken coop to hold it in place. Nobody's going to be sitting on it, and chickens are light. Even if a chicken got up there, it wouldn't be the end of the world. So, and it's well supported. So I mean ideally a forty five degree angle. But here's the point. The forty five degree angle doesn't even have to go all the way out

to the end, okay, because of your rectangle. So you could get away with let's say going out eighteen inches or twenty four inches and down twenty four.

kind of spotted color. So she's a beautiful bird's beautiful.

we're in the market. We're in the market for some interesting breeds and from a health perspective, from a health perspective, and just a human interest perspective. Tina and I always try and pick breeds not only that we love and enjoy looking at and fooling around with, but also we love it when each of our girls lays a slightly different colored egg because, as you know, sometimes health issues

they're almost always related to egg laying. And that way we can be like, I haven't seen one of those dark green eggs here in the egg box for a while. We should go check out out, you know, Julie or whatever, you know, old lady name we're going to give to our chickens, because we always give them ancient, old lady names. So and that's just a way, it's a way of us kind of tracking to make sure everybody, you know, how how's everybody doing?

I want. And so sometimes it takes a couple of months to get in something that I'm interested in. So you might want to give her a call. Yeah, Nan, thank you so much.

to take calls on any other subject as well. And as I said, my goal for this weekend primary ly focused on in detail on tomorrow's show. The big show tomorrow is going to be to now separate the fact from the fictions that you are hearing. There's all sorts of fire hardening, frenzy information out there, crazy stuff, and some of it's crazy. Some of it sounds incredibly reasonable,

but it's all very expensive. And then you've got companies popping up who say that they want to put sprinklers on your top of your roof, and they want to do this, and this is what you need to do because everybody is in fear right now. A lot of it is very, very expensive, and the question is is it effective? And so tomorrow especially, I want to focus in and separate that. I'll give you a little teaser

about it before we're done today. But right now I want to take at least one more call before we move on to that.

So it doesn't put out much heat. And so I'm debating how I can rectify that by having something or adding something to it that might provide us with some heat during these cold, cold winter times.

whole vibe. But you know exactly what you're saying, Mike, when it comes to the actual functionality of the fire and the whole idea of hey, let's all gather around it and stay warm and have a wonderful conversations outside under the stars and so on, that's where they actually fall short. And you know, if a client's like, hey, architecturally, I think it's a great idea, though, Dean, let's go for it. And you know, of course we'll do it, because at the end of the day, you're the boss.

But I usually push toward a firepit over a fireplace, because a fire pit, I can stretch that thing as long as I want. I can run a big gas supply to it and have a big, beautiful, nice flame coming out of it. We can all gather around it. I mean my fire pit in my backyard, you know, I mean I can get eight people around it, and everybody is staying warm because everybody can kind of belly up as close to the fire as they want. And

there you go. A fireplace, even one as large as you're sixteen feet tall, five foot fire box still best case scenario, you've got two maybe three chairs that can get in close to it. And as with all fireplaces inside and out, all traditional fireplaces, nearly ninety percent of the heat goes up the chimney and not out into the space where you're at. So how do you resolve that situation. It's not the easiest thing to resolve. The best thing I can tell you is number One, you're outside.

So because you're outside, it may be of benefit if you can bring. I didn't ask you in detail, and I'm short on time, but whether you've got built canopies or anything over it or near it, but if you brought in an umbrella or two to put over the space to hold some of the heat that is coming out of the box down, not over the chimney, but over the heat of the box, just to hold it

a little bit longer down towards people. That's going to make it a slightly warmer experien probably the most direct way to do it, and it's not uber attractive, but you know, I mean you can find them out there.

And that's one of those tubed blower setups where you've got a kind of a U shaped horseshoe shaped a series of four or five horseshoe shaped tubes that sit the lower tubes on top of the fire bed itself where the gas flame is, and then another set of them they curl up and they sit over the actual flames. Those things superheat and then the convection process of air moving through them. Or if you can bring power, you

can put a powered blower there. That's the best, a powered blower fan with those tubes and literally blow that heated air out of the firebox towards the people and so, and those are available. You can get those at like woodlanddirect dot com. Take a look at those, match them to you the size of your fire box. If you

paint them out blacky, they'll tend to go away. But yeah, you'll get some more direct horizontal heat coming at people who are sitting near the fireplace, more efficiently heating them up than just all of it going up the chimney. But that's actually, I mean, that's that's that's the double

edged sword of an architecturally beautiful traditional outdoor fireplace. They are gorgeous, but when it comes to number of people that they can keep warm, no matter how big they are, it usually amounts to two uh and and you're you know, you're not all curled around it looking at each other. So that's why I always push towards fire pits. But I think that's the that's probably the best thing you can do, my.

a privilege. As always, I want to remind you follow us on social media Instagram, TikTok for like the next forty eight hours, Facebook x at home with Dean the same handle for them all. The House Whisper podcast, which is this very program, is everywhere your favorite podcasts are found. And yeah, it's true you heard right earlier in the show.

If your home is in need of some personal House Whisper attention, if you've fanned the show and you're like, oh, I can only get that guy in my living room talking about what's going on going on here, well you can. You can book an in home design consult with us at house Whisper dot Design. All right, y'all, just a couple of more things before we are done today. As I said at the top of the show, my main goal, you know, I want to take a little break and

want to answer some calls today. Great calls today, thank you, and just give us all sort of a little bit of a shakedown break from all the fire news. But we're not done with fire. You and I Okay, I'm very serious about this. I've been talking about this for years. But every once in a while, of course, along comes a major wildfire disaster. The last one before this one was six years ago, the one that almost threatened our home, the Woolsey fire back in twenty eighteen pre COVID if

you can believe that. But they come, they happen, and they're going to happen again, and I don't want your home to be a victim of that activity next time around. I did not want the Palisades to burn the way they burnt, or the Altadena fire to burn the way it burnt. And you're asking the question, well, what are you going to do about it? Well, there's a lot that you can do about it. There's a lot that we all in southern California or anywhere you live near

an open space should and can do about it. The problem is in the in the forget the pun firestorm of fear and anxiety that comes after a disaster like this has its takes its toll on us uh. People are open to embracing all sorts of ideas that have no basis in factuality or effectiveness. And so what I want to talk to you about, specifically in detail tomorrow is how a fire interacts with your home. It's not what you think. Almost guaranteed it's not what you think.

And we're going to be talking about the fire hardening frenzy, separating the facts from the fictions. And I'm going to set you up. I'm going to give you literally the house whisper list of what I think the steps to take to adequately, effectively, affordably fire harden a home so that next time this event occurs, you have the best possibility whatsoever of your home having a home to come back to.