Product · Fire Safety
Product · InnDex 28 · Evidence provided · High specification risk
Plant-based penetrating fire retardant for mass timber achieving ASTM E84 Class A fire performance.
Ember Guard is a penetrating treatment that impregnates wood cellular structure to meet Class A fire ratings (FSI ≤25, SDI 0), directly enabling mass timber use in high-rise and mid-rise construction where fire-safety code approval is a blocking barrier. The product applies as a liquid treatment, relying on chemical penetration rather than surface coating to achieve fire resilience.
Ember Guard is a penetrating liquid fire retardant that claims to impregnate wood cellular structure to ASTM E84 Class A standards — an FSI at or below 25 — directly addressing the fire-safety approval barrier that has blocked mass timber in many regulated high-rise applications. The appeal for timber-first design teams is real: a plant-based, aesthetics-preserving treatment that enables compliance without surface coatings is a cleaner specification than spray-on intumescent systems. The critical problem is that the evidence base is a single provided data point with no publicly accessible QAI test report, and the claimed SDI of 0 is technically anomalous — SDI 0 is normally reserved for non-combustible materials, making this claim difficult to reconcile with published standards without seeing the underlying test methodology. There are no documented case studies, no Building Control pre-approvals, no independent retests, and no data on long-term aging, moisture resistance, or re-test performance after environmental exposure. Post-treatment structural properties — strength, moisture behaviour, dimensional stability — are also undisclosed, which matters for engineered applications. The product has theoretical merit as a path to mass timber compliance, but until the QAI report is independently reviewed and a building certification is on record, this should not be specified as the compliance basis for a regulated project.
QAI Laboratories is a legitimate accredited fire-testing body, and the attribution to them is credible. However, no publicly accessible QAI test report number, summary, or third-party corroboration of the Ember Guard SDI 0 result was found via search of QAI's published database or industry fire-safety registries. The competing product Firefree Class A has published QAI documentation showing SDI 0 under extended E84 testing, which exists as a precedent but does not validate Ember Guard's claim. The 'catalytic strengthening under heat' claim appears nowhere on the primary product page or official documentation, suggesting marketing overreach. No deployment case studies, specification adoption data, or field-use reports were found. Penetrating fire retardants are a known product category, but this specific formulation's performance and durability in real mass-timber applications remain undemonstrated.
#mass_timber #fire_retardant #penetrating_treatment #code_compliance #tall_wood