I have 3. 2 are still pressurized. One was used last night.
A note to everyone…do your welding before you paint and undercoat, or at least wait for it to dry fully first.
Hope it all turned out ok! You’re posting so clearly you survived
Everything is fine. I was welding in the outer rocker when it ignited. It was a brief flash and then it went out. I only used the fire extinguisher because I saw smoke coming from the seatbelt hole near the top of the door. I figured better safe than sorry. Of course now the inside of the rocker that I can’t get to anymore is covered in white powder, but at least it’s kinda fireproof now.
Maybe I am just projecting here, but I believe the average Lemmy user to be too much of a nerd to be welding in their free time. Is it possible to be both Bonehead?
You’re projecting. I weld because I’m a nerd. This job is just helping out a buddy, but before that I was welding a new mount for my trailer hitch snow plow that I built a few years ago. And this summer I want to build a remote control lawnmower which is going to involve a lot of welding, plus some code to reprogram the hoverboards that I bought for that project. The real challenge there will be adding basic intelligence with a Raspberry Pi so that it will mow the lawn itself. But that’s a few years away, since I still need to build it first. And that starts with welding the frame.
It’s not really possible to be both, since one is merely a tool that satisfies the needs of the other. Nerd always takes precedence…
Piggybacking on this PSA to remind everyone;
- Attack the base of the fire, where the fuel source is. You need to break the fire triangle to stop the reaction, and drowning out oxygen is the easiest way.
- Each rated pound of fire extinguisher yields approximately one second of use. They go quickly when you’re fighting any fire, and even small fires fight back. 5lb is the minimum imo, look at any commercial setting where OSHA applies and it’s big 10-20lb tanks generally.
- Trainers advise to blow the whole extinguisher even if flames aren’t visible to prevent auto-ignition.
- You really, really want a hose on any extinguisher. Invert the extinguisher to get under a car/cabinet/low obstacle and the extinguisher is useless as the pressurized gas escapes, leaving behind the powder/foam/water that actually stops fire.
I have four fire extinguishers:
- One in the kitchen
- One in the basement
- One in my office (where I do stuff like soldering and 3D-printing)
- One mounted to the roll bar of my Miata (I ought to get some for my other cars, but haven’t gotten around to making mounting brackets yet)
However, I never would’ve thought to check them (or turn them upside down to “fluff” them) without this post, so thanks!
As a gift to my friends who were going to be first time parents, I bought them a pack and play, a first aid kit, and a fire extinguisher. They laughed at my fire extinguisher gift and told their other friends who also laughed.
Laugh all they want burning alive is a shit way to go. And you might have saved them from that fate.
Just to be pedantic, I think most people who die in building fires perish due to smoke inhalation. Still bad though, and almost completely preventable!
Awh, that’s kind of crappy. I’m hoping they just took it as a gag gift; be prepared for anything, a bit like Jack Jack in The Incredibles.
I hope theynever have to use it, but I hope they do learn how important it is.
Same for cleaning dryer lint; before I was born the entire family who lived across the road from my mum perished in a house fire from dryer lint catching.
Also add Carbon monoxide detectors to that list of devices you never want to need, but should never be without
Dryer lint fires are so strange to me. Cleaning out the lint trap takes less than 5 seconds, and I do it with every load. I pulled the dryer hose off last weekend to clean it, and it was spotless, presumably because I clean the lint from the trap.
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.
Absolutely it is one of these products that you probably never need. But when you do you are so happy you had it standing around.
I do routine inspections once a year when I do my fire alarm testing so every time I switch to daylight saving time.
Just caused an oil fire last week and fortunately it was working. I’ve since replaced also.
I’m a professional fire performer, so I have four :P
(Admittedly two need refilling)
Those years of safety training finally paying off:
Do you know what types of fires your fire extinguisher is rated for? There are several different types. Most modern home fire extinguishers are rated for A (wood/paper), B (liquids like oil fires), and C (electrical), but you may have an older fire extinguisher or landlord who cheaped out on one that only works on some of those types.
If you have a fire that’s based on metals (like fireworks) or exothermic chemical reactions, have a different fire extinguisher or call the fire department with special instructions.
Always remember the acronym PASS when using a fire extinguisher:
- Pull the pin
- Aim at the base of the fire
- Squeeze the trigger
- Sweep the fire extinguisher side to side to cover all of the fire till the fire is extinguished
If you have a fire that’s based on metals (like fireworks) or exothermic chemical reactions, have a different fire extinguisher or call the fire department with special instructions.
It ought to go without saying, but maybe not for some, so it’s worth pointing out that there’s a difference between a fire started by fireworks and one fueled by fireworks.
Great point! So if you have a firework that sparks some dry grass or brush, your home fire extinguisher will likely be fine as long as the fire doesn’t get too big before you can grab it.
However, if you have a hoard of fireworks that catch fire, you’re better off running and calling the fire department than trying to quickly put that out with your home fire extinguisher as it likely won’t work.
My extensive training has left me with the impression that yelling “SHORT BURST” and pointing at any red LEDs is equally important
Yup. We had one but after we had a smouldering fire in our outdoor trash can we got several for different points in the house. We also have escape ladders in the bedrooms.
After being directly adjacent to three separate apartment fires, we also have several fire extinguishers and escape ladders stashed around the apartment.
Fire blankets are good to have as well
I don’t use permanently pressurized fire extinguishers anymore, as they are hard to maintain and rarely reach a life span of 20 years.
Make sure to check at least once every 3 years if the pressure is still in the green. If not, replace it immediately.
Can they be repressurized at all with a regular pump? Or is it something more in depth than that
If you look at the gauge, you can see that the ideal pressure is 1344 kPa or 13.44 bar. If you own a pump capable of using at least 14 bar, you are good to go.
To tag on to all the good advice, you should DEFINITELY keep a decent sized fire extinguisher in your car as well. I’ve stopped one engine fire on a car not my own from spreading by having one. Pop the hood (if it’s safe to reach the latch) and unload that shit.
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I suppose I should clarify. Pop it but don’t fully unlatch it, then send the extinguisher up through the new gap between grille and hood so it actually gets on top of the engine. Thru the radiator and underneath is often ineffective as most fires will be sitting up on top of the engine where most wires and fuel lines exist.
Currently have 6. I need to get more, and larger ones. We live in a log house, in an area that takes a minimum of 20 minutes for emergency services to get to, and heat with a wood stove. We absolutely need to practice fire safety all the time.
Oh man, definitely get more!
That’s the idea. The really big ones get pretty expensive though; a 30# fire extinguisher starts at around $500, and can get up to about $1500. But that size gets you about 20-30 seconds of continuous use, which is enough for a pretty big house fire.
Yes and yes, regularly serviced. And synced smoke alarms, wired with battery backup.
I’ve even got sprinklers.
And synced smoke alarms
Same. Also, they are both smoke and heat alarms so they also trigger for smokeless fires. They are also linked into my home automation system, if triggered every light in the house will turn on to maximum brightness. It will also send an alert to my phone.
Home assistant is glorious…
Wouldn’t know, never used it. I tend to stay away from anything written in python as much as I can.
Considering what I’ve seen written in various languages from C to html, I don’t judge by a language being used.
What are you using?
Some languages are much more difficult to write reliable and stable code in, especially for larger codebases. Python is one of those. I’m not saying it can’t be done, but that’s despite the language being used, not thanks to it.
My home runs on OpenHAB, which is written in Java and built on top of OSGi.
When I set up my home automation (which was years ago) I looked into the technical aspects of the different options and OpenHAB had by far the most solid architecture.
Got it. I’ve got a friend running openhab, decent solution though it couldn’t meet my needs.
To my experience, writing reliable code is more about the coding strategy than anything else, the language used doesn’t even make the list. And I’ve developed with pascal back in the day.
Glad you’ve got a solution that works for you!
To my experience, writing reliable code is more about the coding strategy than anything else, the language used doesn’t even make the list. And I’ve developed with pascal back in the day.
Language makes a lot of difference in my experience. For example: a good type system can eliminate entire classes of mistakes. In Swift for example there are optional types, Non-optional types can never be
niland for optional types you have to explicitly deal with the possibility of a variable beingnil. Boom, null-pointer error are a thing of the past, enforced by the compiler. One less thing to worry about.
why?
It’s very difficult to write and maintain any significant amount of code in a ducktyped language. I don’t trust python code to be reliable or stable. It’s a nice toy language for academic projects but in no way suitable for production use. I certainly won’t have it controlling the things in my home that should just work, like the lights.
There is plenty of production code written and maintained in Python outside of academia, as well as Perl, PHP and others. You’re presenting an opinion as fact.
I’m not saying it can’t be done, only that it’s not a good idea.
what’s is ducktyped
In most programming languages data has a type. You can think of it as the ‘shape’ of the data. For example: you have an ‘integer’ type which can contain whole numbers, a ‘floating point’ type which can contain fractional numbers, a ‘string’ type which can contain text, etc.
These simple types are called ‘primitive’ types, they are built into the language itself.
Usually, you can also define your own types, which are made up of the primitive types, for example: you can have a ‘car’ type:
class Car { float maximumSpeed; int numberOfPassengers; String brand; String model; }Meaning any piece of data of type ‘Car’ has a maximum speed, number of passengers, brand an model.
Now languages like Java have so called static typing. You declare something to be a car, and the compiler knows that a car has these properties. This is used in a lot of places. Variables have types, parameters passed to a function have types. The return values of functions have types, etc. Static typing means you always know exactly what type of data you are dealing with.
Ducktyping is the exact opposite. The term comes from ‘if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck’. In a ducktyped language you don’t declare what type something is, you just use the data as if you know what type it is, and if it’s the correct type, it works. If it’s not, things might break.
In a statically typed language it is impossible to use the wrong type, this is enforced by the compiler. In a ducktyped language this is impossible, as the types are not declared. So if a function expects a ‘Car’ as a parameter, and you pass in a ‘Horse’ instead, in Java you would get an error when trying to compile this code. In Python it would just run it. This may be fine. A horse may also have a maximumSpeed and if you try to read that it would work. But when you try to access something a Horse doesn’t have, like the ‘brand’ property, things go tits up.
The main problem with this is that you only see this if you happen to run that specific bit of code in that specific situation. It may never happen during testing. Worse, if you change anything in ‘Car’ you don’t necessarily catch all the problems this causes. Say you rename ‘numberOfPassengers’ to ‘passengerCount’, in Java any code that still tried to access ‘numberOfPassengers’ would fail to compile, you’d immediately get an error. In Python you wouldn’t spot this problem at all until it’s too late.
The advantage of ducktyping is that it’s less verbose, you can whip something together quickly without having to think too much about the types. For a small simple program this is perfect, but the larger your codebase gets the harder it becomes to manage this. You can’t oversee the whole codebase anymore, mistakes happen and the compiler won’t catch them.
You can mitigate it a little, for example by writing lots of automated tests, but you really shouldn’t have to. A static type system prevents a lot of dumb mistakes from being made.
Do they go bad even if they are still pressurized? I’m thinking they are nearly 20 years old now…
Yup. And you’re supposed to have a professional inspect them annually. You’re supposed to inspect them every month.
Good question.
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.
