On Wed, 04 Sep 2019 01:44:54 -0400, micky
wrote:

In alt.home.repair, on Tue, 3 Sep 2019 09:40:28 -0400, Ed Pawlowski
wrote:

On 9/3/2019 4:38 AM, micky wrote:
My townhouse has a shaft about 3' square from the basement ceiling to
the attic "floor". IIRC part of it is filled with a laundry chute. I
can't remember what else.

What is this shaft called? Do all recent houses of specific
configurations in the USA have them?

How long have houses had these things? Our houses from the 30's and
from the 50's didn't have one, but the 50's house had only a crawlspace,
no basement.

Could be a utility chase. Sounds like it would be good to have if there
was a fire in the basement. It would be able to get flames to the attic
faster to engulf the entire building. Not sure it would meet code today.

I had forgotten that there was a plywood floor at the same height as the
2nd floor floor. So it would not function as a chimney.

When I wanted to run wires from the basement to the attic, I had to lie
on my belly in the attic, add a 1 foot extension to my 6 foot flexible
drill bit and with my arm stretched as far down as it would go, try to
drill a hole in the plywood. The flexible nature of the bit made this
hard, took maybe a half hour. (I had no non-flex bit that long.) Then I
had to come up with some way to pull the wires through the 3/4" hole. I
forget how got the first string through, but after that, I could pull it
back and forth to drag everything else.

I made a mistake in not leaving a "runner" there when I was done.
Because they invented new wires, like maybe satellite feed. Not that I
actually would have run more wires but I still should have made it easy
for myself when it would have taken no effort to do that.

A 3/4" hole isn't enough to encourage or spread fire is it?

A better solution would have been to shove a piece of EMT (conduit)
between floors with covered metal boxes at both ends. That is code
compliant. Draft stopping is just that, you are stopping the flow of
the products of combustion between floors (Hot gasses and smoke). They
really want penetrations sealed. A fire would quickly make that 3/4"
hole much bigger. Smoke is unburned fuel.