[This followup was posted to alt.home.repair and a copy was sent to the
cited author.]

gregz posted for all of us...



Art Todesco wrote:
On 12/7/2015 3:13 AM, Uncle Monster wrote:
On Monday, December 7, 2015 at 12:40:05 AM UTC-6, Tony Hwang wrote:
wrote:
Several year ago, a guy I know bought a rural home which had a fire. He
pretty much paid for the land and a garage, and the house was included
for free. Aside from smoke damage, most of the house was salvagable, and
had not burned. But one room was burned. He knew he had a lot of work to
do, but for a good price, he bought it.

He has since been rebuilding. Initially, the room that burned had to be
rebuilt from the floor up. The rest of the house had to have much of the
sheetrock, cabinets, flooring and so on, replaced because of the smoke
damage, as well as replacing all the wiring.

But, there is a reason I'm posting this, because it's a very bizarre
situation. The room where the fire started, ignited because of an
electrical short. But one that no one would expect. Whoever built that
house, put sheetrock on the walls, covered them with chicken wire, then
applied another layer of sheetrock over the chicken wire. Dont ask me
why.... I asked the guy who now owns it, and he said he tried to locate
the original owner or builder, but it appers the guy died from old age.
So, no one knows why they used 2 layers of sheetrock or the chicken
wire.

My thoughts on this could be two reasons. He was going to apply some
sort of stucco to the walls and the chicken wire was the base for it,
then changed his mind and just covered the walls again with more
sheetrock. OR the chicken wire was intended to keep rodents out, but I
know for fact that mice and rats can get thru a hole much smaller than
the holes in chicken wire. Anyhow, no one really knows the reason......

However, the fire was caused because a drywall screw penetrated an
electrical cable. That same screw was contacting the chicken wire
between the layers of sheetrock. And that chicken wire was likely
grounded to an electrical box, or maybe pipes, or something else. It was
probably like that for years. One day the chicken wire got hot enough to
start the place on fire.

This was the determination of the cause of the fire from the fire
investigators. The present owner said when they tore those walls down,
they could see sections of the chicken wire were welded and melted and
left burn marks on the paper coating of the sheetrock. He also said the
teardown was a tough job because of that chicken wire.

This is definitely an unusual case, so I thought I'd share it!


Maybe chicken wires were there to shield EMF?

That's what I thought too. A Faraday cage. (???)

[8~{} Uncle Cage Monster

On a side note, my previous house, built in 1972 in the south western
suburbs of Chicago, used drywall coated with aluminum foil on the back,
as a vapor barrier. Obviously the chicken wire wouldn't act as a vapor
barrier, however, it was interesting that almost all cell phones,
including mine, didn't work inside this house. When I was forced to
replace the phone (lost, actually hidden under the car seat), the new one
worked perfectly, even in the basement! When it was finally found, I kept the new one.

Due to some of my concerns about RFI, the engineers of a medical research
building specified aluminum backed drywall. It was attached to steel studs.
How did it work ? Fair. Better in the inner rooms in the building. 13
stories. The outer rooms with doors and windows into the hallway were not
that great at shielding. Any small openings or poor connections can leak.
Any wiring, ac, Internet, etc, can feed RFI into the space. They built
another building with the same specs nearby. Luckily, most if the intense
interference disappeared. Was the old analog tv transmitter at WQED
Pittsburgh. Home of Mr. Rodgers. After the conversion to digital, there was
no video to demodulate. It just appeared as random noise.

Another of my investigations resulted in fitting the bottom half if a lab

How many aluminum foil hats?

--
Tekkie