My husband is lovely. Really. He is. He also thinks he is funny. So funny, in fact, that one Christmas he gave me a foam fire extinguisher to use in my house. You know, just in case my cooking went terribly wrong. Ha ha – funny man. Put it this way, he didn’t get any home-cooked food for a while after that. I think he has learnt his lesson!
However, since then, we have got married, and moved house. Just before we moved, my eagle-eyed FPO colleague and bestest bud, Fiona, noticed that my fire extinguisher was looking a little forlorn. It has lost pressure. The lovely little coloured dial at the top of it should have shown the needle in the green “all-is-well” section. However, the needle had slipped downwards into the red “Alert! Alert! Underpowered fire extinguisher here” section. Bad times.
I must admit, that in the chaos of moving, I may have slightly ignored Fiona’s observation, and carried on in my merry way. I did pack the aforementioned extinguishing device. Very carefully in one of the many, many moving boxes. I even lovingly wrapped it up in that funny squishy packaging stuff to make sure it didn’t get damaged on the way from Kent to Dorset. It was only when I was unpacking (yet more!) boxes last week that I became reacquainted with the extinguisher, and remembered what Fiona had told me.
What to do? I must admit that even thought I write these blogs for all you lovely people out in reader-land, my knowledge of fire safety equipment is not all-encompassing. I tend to have very good knowledge of what I am writing about, as I do research like a good girl. However, general extinguisher knowledge is somewhat lacking, and so I turn to the lovely folks at Fire Protection Online to assist me, as they are very good when it comes to all things extinguisher-related.
I wondered if one could re-pressurise such a thing, but apparently it is simply not worth it. It is just a tiddly little 1 kg foam extinguisher, and it is cheaper to get a new one. With larger extinguishers, obviously things are a little different, and you can get a nice engineer chap out to weave his magic and bring the equipment back to life, but in the case of my little 1kg tiddler – I think it’s curtains!
So, after discussion with the lovely Fiona, we came up with the idea of getting a powder extinguisher instead – and I shall explain why in my next post. Suffice it to say, it arrived yesterday and now has pride of place on my new coffee table whilst I decide where to put it…so thank you very much all the staff at FPO – but I hope I shall never have to use my moving in present!!!
