Peak wildfire season may be over in California, but home-threatening fires remain a year-round threat in many areas, and this innovative three-part kit offers homeowners some new and easy ways to give houses a fighting chance.
Provided your roof's up to spec, the exterior of the house isn't typically where the trouble starts; it's the embers that get you. Flying on the wind, sometimes miles ahead of the fire front, a firestorm of glowing embers infiltrates the home through unsealed cracks and vents, taking advantage of the combustible furniture and drapes to burn it down from within.
There are plenty of home fire protection products already on the market, from super-tight mesh window coverings to ember-proof vents, exterior and interior fireproof paints – but we reckon this new three-part home protection kit from California's Safe Soss adds enough innovative touches to be worth highlighting.
It's focused on quick, do-it-yourself home preparation when a wildfire's on the way, and designed to be as simple as possible to get done in a rush.
"The idea is everyone should have them in the garage and at the ready," says wildland firefighter and Safe Soss Managing Partner Nicholai Allen, who I last caught up with in 2024 as he was launching the world's smallest fire extinguisher for Maus, itself a fascinating zero-residue device that actually works using pyrotechnics.
The Safe Soss gear is a little less bombastic. Firstly, for vents, there's a cut-to-size ember-proof carbon filter. This spongy polymer mesh is infused with fire retardant all the way through, and coated with activated carbon to absorb radiant heat. Cut to the right size with scissors, stuff it it behind every vent, and that's one key danger taken care of.
"This has simply never existed as an option before," Allen tells us. "It's a custom made poly-carbon matrix that looks like a lava rock, but is malleable and can be cut to size to fit behind most any existing vents that need protection year round, even from smoke of neighboring wildfires."
Then there's other gaps embers might wiggle through – around your doors and windows, cracks and under the eaves, for example. For this, Safe Soss makes a heat-resistant, ember-proof tape designed for last-minute application. It uses a temporary clean-peel adhesive designed to stick to exterior surfaces right through the heat of the fire, but to then peel off afterwards without pulling off paint or leaving sticky glue behind. "The tape is made of fiberglass," says Allen, "and brings professional-grade ember gap sealing to homeowners."
And finally, there's a "twice over" fire prevention spray that ships in plastic bottles designed to attach directly to a regular garden hose. This mixes the ultra-concentrated formula in with water as you spray, delivering the proper concentration and ideal spray pattern, making it about the easiest solution on the market to get onto the home exterior, fences and any outdoor vegetation in a hurry, without needing any specialist spray gear. Indeed, the spray bottle's probably worth hanging onto even once it's empty.
The phosphate-based spray is also human-, animal- and plant-safe, designed to cling tightly to foliage with minimal runoff, and acts as a fertilizer to promote regrowth after the fire passes through.
"There is nothing like this on the market," says Allen. "We have the patent on applying the retardant with the hose and had to engineer that from scratch. The liquid is made and shipped from Japan. The spray has a five-year shelf life and the tape 10 years, so it can be stored at the ready and used ahead of a red flag warning or fire weather warning."
All three are available through Lowe's – the cut-to-size vent filters are about US$40 each per 23.5 x 11-inch (60 x 28-cm) block, the clean-peel sealing tape is $30 per 35-foot-long (11 m), 4-inch-wide (10-cm) roll, and the twice-over spray is a little under $150 a bottle, which is enough to cover about 400 square feet (37.2 sq m).
Source: Safe Soss
