I have one in my car, I check it every 6 months. I was trained to do full inspections and repairs at my last job. I only have a fire blanket in the house though.
I have one and pressure is OK (at least if the gauge isn’t stuck). Is there anything else that you can check yourself instead of having it professionally inspected once a year? Does anyone know what they inspect?
Fire related: If you have smoke detectors there should be a button on it to check the battery.
Not fire related: You can check if your home first aid kit needs to be restocked. Sometimes you might take out some bandages and forget to replace them.
Followed by: do you have a functional fire extinguisher in your kitchen and can you reach it immediately?
Stove top fires are usually easy, just put a lid on whatever to put them out, but there’s always going to be someone who panics and dumps water on a grease fire.
Not too immediately. Take 3 steps back/towards the nearest exit, that’s where you want the extinguisher. Not right next to the stove that’s going to be on fire when you need to get to the extinguisher.
Keep in mind that a standard ABC extinguisher isn’t rated for grease fryers. If it’s just the fat needed to sautee something you’re good, but for an actual deep frying fire you want something in class K.
Yeah, 4. Bought when we bought the house. Kitchen, bedroom, garage, and living roon where the wood stove is. Little one-time use ones in basement and kitchen again.
Yes the dry powder type which is most common, can go “bad” usually from excessive moisture in the pressurization gas. This causes the powder to clump and no longer come out.
This can be prevented by inverting the extinguisher a few times a year to make sure the powder is still “fluid” and to break up any clumped up powder.
One for every room I intent for humans to survive in, plus one in each car. Also recently upgraded to hardwired CO/smoke detectors and each bedroom also has a combination alarm that uses Z-Wave to alert me anywhere, just as a backup. Also, we practice fire and earthquake drills monthly, along with a couple of other scenarios that are more rare/less dangerous.
Take a look at the fault lines around California. There’s lots of seismic activity, and we’re close to train tracks so we have gas mask drills too (added after what happened in East Palestine). Given the major large-scale risks in our area are fire, earthquakes, and a train derailment spilling chemicals, those drills seem prudent.
Yes, 4 easily accessible in various locations in the house and 1 in the garage. I check them all when I change out the batteries on my smoke alarms, which I do all at once when one starts to chirp.
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