How Fire Rated Super Seal-X ‘Drives Labor Productivity’ for Denver High-Rise

The Project: Hybrid ‘multifamily/hospitality’ high-rise in expanding Denver Tech Center

This high-rise in the rapidly growing residential district of the Tech Center neighborhood of Denver, Colo., is designed to offer upscale, urban lodging — whether you’re living in the city permanently or staying there for one night. With 175 hotel rooms and 189 luxury for-rent apartments, Belleview North Tower spans 609,000 square feet in total, according to Colorado Construction & Design.

Like many modern high-rises, each unit within the Belleview North Tower features massive floor-to-ceiling windows. The windows are part of unitized curtain wall systems, which can create challenges where transitioning between these exterior partitions and interior ones — challenges that led interior contractor South Valley Drywall to search for a new, less costly, code-compliant solution for these areas. Soon enough, South Valley Drywall found their solution: Trim-Tex’s latest fire rated drywall accessory, Super Seal-X.

The Product: ‘Easier to install’ fire rated Super Seal-X

In recent years, building codes have begun specifying that these joints between curtain walls and interior partitions must include firestopping materials. (According to 2021 [24] IBC 715.6: “Voids created at the intersection of nonfire-resistance rated exterior curtain wall assemblies and vertical fire barriers shall be filled with an approved material or system to retard interior spread of fire and hot gases.”) Super Seal-X was designed to be the easiest, most user-friendly solution to comply with these requirements — without sacrificing an aesthetically pleasing finish.

“Super Seal-X is an interface between our interior partitions going into the exterior mullion of the unitized glazing system,” Travis Vap, CEO of South Valley Drywall, told us. “Traditionally in our marketplace, we've left the fire rating or that transition to the unitized glaze or the glazing trade. However, they don't really understand our trade as wall and ceiling contractors. That's where this product helps solve those issues, and interface our walls to the exterior in a cost-effective value way.”

Super Seal-X is a bead with a rigid vinyl leg that attaches to drywall and a flexible vinyl bubble gasket that forms a tight, consistent seal against the adjoining substrate, i.e., metal window mullions. It features a tear-off strip that protects the window from joint compound, leaving behind a clean, finished edge once removed. On the other side of that gasket, you’ll find a strip of innovative intumescent tape that expands to 30 times its size when exposed to heat, choking off the wall joint from the spread of smoke and fire. This bead is fire rated per UL System WW-D-0182, and sound tested per ASTM E90. It's available in two colors, pink and black; South Valley chose the black version of the bead due to its less noticeable effect next to the black mullions.

“We're using the black Super Seal-X up at the end of a wall that intersects into a glass curtain wall,” says South Valley Drywall General Manager, Commercial Division, Duane Haynie. “By using that product there, we're able to eliminate a pre-manufactured aluminum closure piece that is quite expensive. This is a lot easier to install. It gives us a great look and it performs equally.”

The Payoff: ‘We live and die on labor’

The true value of an easily installed bead like Super Seal-X lies in its low learning curve and its boosted labor efficiency — which, in today’s marketplace of labor scarcity, can make a world of difference.

“In this industry, we actually have to look at not only labor, but material,” says Vap. “What we find is, with every dollar we spend on material, we get it back in labor, because labor is a scarce resource. Traditionally, as wall and ceiling contractors, it was really easy: we'd just go to whatever the cheapest product was. However, with scarce labor, that's not the case. We actually spend more money on materials now because it drives our labor productivity. When you look at the whole package, it's really about: how do you put it together and put dollars not only in your pocket, but also your clients?”

Super Seal-X’s straightforward installation process made the solution simpler for South Valley’s crews to work with. Super Seal-X is installed by inserting the bead into a 3/8” gap between drywall and the adjoining substrate, ensuring the bubble gasket is compressed inside the joint. The bead is attached using 847 Spray Adhesive and half-inch staples every six to eight inches (or, if declining to use the glue, doubling up on staples, every two to three inches) and finishing with joint compound.

(NOTE: In the photos and video featured on this page, South Valley Drywall opted to use mesh tape over Super Seal-X’s mud leg. This is an optional step, and not required to ensure the performance of the bead or a clean, long-lasting finish.)

“Ease of installation is probably the biggest thing — we live and die on labor,” says Haynie. “However, we still have to have performance, and it checked both of those boxes.”

“It’s pretty simple,” adds Drywall Finisher Andres Ibarra. “It’s easy: just place, measure and staple. I trained probably two people — it takes me five minutes to teach them and they’re good to go.”

The other ease-of-use advantage of using this fire rated drywall accessory is that — for most professional drywall finishers and commercial crews like this one — it’s not significantly different from installing other drywall finishing beads they’ve been using for many years, like Trim-Tex’s Tear Away L Bead. If you’ve used products like this one before, picking up this new solution won’t require much training; as Haynie tells us, “the learning curve was negligible.” 

“The really nice thing about these products,” says Vap, “they actually are just extension of all the products we've always utilized. It's really easy to transition our people and our manpower in working with these products, since we're not reinventing the wheel. They're taking lessons learned from our current products and just adapting them to these products.”

Thank you to Travis Vap, Duane Haynie, Adres Ibarra and the rest of the South Valley Drywall team for inviting us onto this exciting new project. You can learn more about South Valley and their work here.

Super Seal-X is just one member of Trim-Tex's trailblazing line of drywall accessories designed to seal off wall and ceiling joints from the spread of fire, smoke and sound. Learn more about Trim-Tex Fire + Sound Solutions by hitting the button below.