Fire Blocking Decoupled Walls

I've been taking a crash course on fire blocking lately, and I have a nagging question. The requirements, as I understand them, are to block vertical sections of wall from horizontal sections. Further, you have to provide blocking every 10' horizontally. Now, this gets a little tricky when you have a decoupled wall using clips and channel. For the connection between the walls and the ceilings, it's fairly simple. Hopefully Ted and John at the Soundproofing Company won't mind me posting their detail again



As long as you have something to run your first layer of ceiling drywall up to, you can caulk the edge and maintain your decoupling as well as provide fire blocking.

The part I don't understand, though, is how do you provide the blocking every 10' of horizontal wall space? You have a gap between your studs and the first layer of drywall on your wall that I don't see an easy way of filling without coupling your drywall to the wall.

Hmmm... I don't think Ted will like the sound of that I know one of their SIMs specifically mentions keeping the insulation off of the channel. Although, I really don't see any alternatives.

Edit: I shouldn't speak for Ted I spoke with him earlier and my understanding is he would not have an issue with the insulation against the DW as long as it is not compressed.
Edited by J_P_A - 2/14/13 at 9:43am

My framing is spaced off the wall, but for that side I've stuffed insulation in the opening between the top plate and the foundation. That's a good point though.

Mr. Tim, I'm not sure which point from the previous posts you are addressing. To comply with the code, you are required to put fireblocking at the top of the wall and every 10' horizontally. The detail provided from The Soundproofing company addresses the ceiling/wall intersection where clips and channel are used, but for my case required insulation between the top plate and the foundation to provide the "blocking" on the back side. In order to meet the 10' horizontal distance requirement, we need to add blocking between the foundation and the studs as well as some sort of blocking between the studs and drywall where clips and channel are used. Perhaps my previous posts wasn't clear as to which of those two cases I was addressing?

Does the 10' blocking go from plate to plate or from concrete floor to the top plate?

Good info as always!

I'm considering using a pressure treated 2x for my 10' blocking. Might not be the cheapest, but it would certainly be quick.

Scratch that. I've already got some scrap 5/8" DW. I'll just use that and leave a small gap that I can caulk.
Edited by J_P_A - 2/14/13 at 1:14pm

I probably know the answer to this already, but do corners count with regard to 10' of horizontal space? That is, if I have a 10' section with a corner, followed by 3' section, followed by a 9' section, do I need to add blocking there?

In my case the foundation is in the shape I described above, and the wall is framed just inside it following that shape. The arrows in the image below point to foundation wall, concrete, corners.

My guess is that the same fireblocking would be required since fire is not really going to care about corners, but I'm not sure.

Awesome! Thanks for the help. Now, if you would just stop by one afternoon and take care of all this, that would be even better I'm not going to hold my breath, though

Yeah, I suppose the drive from N.Y. to the great state of Alabama might be a bit much to ask

I do appreciate all the advice!

I thought I would post a couple pictures of the finished product. Between the posts on this thread and the conversation with our inspector I decided to stuff insulation in at the top plate and I used a combination of 5/8" and 1/2" drywall to provide blocking every 10' horizontally. Here you can see some of both.



It's not pretty, but it works. I also caulked the gap between the foundation and the DW with some fire rated caulk.

Here you can see that I added a strip of DW around the top of the wall so that I can seal the first layer of ceiling DW. Normally this would not be necessary, as the first layer of ceiling DW would butt against the top plate, but because I had to fur down my ceiling, my DW was just a little lower than the top plate. No worries, this did the trick.



Finally, here's a shot of a section at the back where the top plate is buried further up into the ceiling. I cut some 2x6s to fill the gap and give me something to seal that first layer of DW against. It creates a sort of pocket, but the top of the wall ovelaps the foundation and my blocking is butted against the top of the wall.



Once you understand what you're trying to accomplish, this whole process becomes a lot simpler. It probably took me 2 hours in all to finish this up. Although, it would have taken the framers much less time to do it when they were building the house

Hopefully this will come in handy for someone else.