FORTIFIED Home Silver Certification

Home Design Fortified Home

A program of the Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety
Energy Geeks President-Ed Beauchemin FORTIFIED WISE-ID#500000508

FORTIFIED Home Program-SILVER Certification

What is FORTIFIED Home?

FORTIFIED Home is a third party certification program which specifies design and construction standards to increase a homes resilience during tropical storms and hurricanes. The FORTIFIED Home program has three levels of certification, starting with Bronze then Silver and lastly Gold, each building upon the next.

What is Required for Silver?

In addition to all the requirements of Bronze which I described in my last blog, this certification level focuses on securing roofs over porches, carports, patios and protecting openings such as garage doors, windows and entries.

An example of opening breech
An example of opening breech

Overview of the Silver requirements:

  • You can imagine how vulnerable a porch roof (see pic below) might be to uplift in extreme weather. Therefore it is crucial to provide mechanical connections that attach from the roof framing down to the beam that supports it. This beam is then mechanically connected to the supporting column which in turn mechanically connects to the structure below. The idea is to build structures that can withstand hurricane winds, by creating a path of mechanical connections from the roof to the foundation.
An example of a porch roof - FORTIFIED Silver
An example of a porch roof
  • Gable walls over 48” in height or higher must be braced from the inside (see pic below). This is to prevent this wall section from buckling inwards under high pressure.
Gable end bracing from the inside
Gable end bracing from the inside
  • Garage doors, windows and entries are all examples of openings that are built into the structure of a home. If any of these openings should be breeched in a high wind event the result would be the pressurization of the building. This is one of the leading causes of catastrophic structure failure. Therefore protecting openings from high wind and projectile debris is a high priority. The Silver Certification allows you to address this issue by either buying windows and doors that are built and certified to withstand the hazards from hurricanes or as an option to employ a qualified impact resistant system such as Hurricane Fabric (see pic below).
Garage door protected with Hurricane Fabric
Garage door protected with Hurricane Fabric

At Energy Geeks our new home and retrofit designs include as an option all the details required to meet the high standards of either the Bronze, Silver or Gold categories of FORTIFIED Home.