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.
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.
I had a fire alarm go off in the middle of the night. They were all hard wired so blaring in the whole house, woken up from a dead sleep. I was running around the entire house looking for the fire. Having that happen and not having a fire extinguisher was the worst most sinking feeling in my life. There was no fire, one of the alarms just went bad. Next day I ordered a fire extinguisher for each bedroom, kitchen, both cars, etc.
I had that exact thing happen again recently and I learned alarms are only good for about 10 years. The one that failed was just over 10 years old, so I replaced them all and put a reminder in my calendar to replace them all in 10 years again. I have had all the extinguishers for several years. I look once in awhile to make sure they’re still in the green, but I should probably have them inspected or replace them. I’m not perfect by a stretch either.
One of those places I’m so much more than happy to pay the money and never have to use it though.
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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