Fire Extinguisher Cabinets are not a strictly legal requirement for the fire safety of your premises. But treating them as such is a helpful way toward consistent and accessible fire risk prevention.
At Fire Protection Online, we stock a wide range of cabinets for a variety of applications. But what doesn’t come with them is the knowledge of how to adjust your fire safety practices to the beneficial integration of extinguisher cabinets. In this article, I will go over five key considerations you should make when installing one.
1. You Cannot “Set and Forget” with Fire Extinguisher Cabinets!
Heading things up with something quite broad here. It’s important to keep in mind that installing an extinguisher cabinet is not the final stage in ensuring fire safety. Nor is it a substitute for neglecting regular checks and maintenance of your equipment.
Fire extinguishers require consistent and thorough surveying. This is to make sure that they are in working order and that the type of extinguisher matches its environment. Making sure their placement is obvious and accessible is another part of this, and is a massively important aspect of installing cabinets as well.
Maintenance, placement, and relevant training for both fire extinguishers and their cabinets should be regularly upheld and adapted to reflect any changes in your workplace. I know this might sound obvious, but it’s an essential mentality to bring to all the points on this list.
2. Clear Signage is Key!
Extinguishers should be easy to find, both for regular occupants of your premises and visitors alike. The location of the extinguisher itself, as well as the placement of signs, are the main contributing factors to this.
Extinguisher ID signs detail, as simply as possible, the type of extinguisher and what it can be used for. An extinguisher should always have the relevant sign placed in close proximity, ideally right next to it. The same goes for a cabinet.
An extinguisher cabinet will make your extinguisher much easier to spot, but the right sign should still be close by. This means that users will be able to quickly identify the extinguisher in the cabinet before they open it. Additionally, if the cabinet has a transparent screen, the key details on the extinguisher should be facing out from it. Adhering to these principles should alleviate the ambiguity that an extinguisher cabinet could potentially cause.
3. Don’t Block the Box!
I don’t mind acknowledging that a cabinet will technically make accessing an extinguisher slower than if it were just out in the open (either on a stand, wall bracket, or heaven forbid, just freestanding). So if you want a better idea of the advantages of extinguisher cabinets, then I would point toward this article.
But what is more pertinent is how accessible the cabinet is in the first place. An extinguisher cabinet is, by definition, a piece of furniture. And there is probably plenty of furniture in your workplace of no real concern, that is blocked off or otherwise concealed by other fixtures or ‘temporary’ piles of junk that you’re totally gonna move tomorrow morning. You cannot afford to have this attitude affect your fire extinguisher cabinets, especially if said junk happens to be cardboard or of some other flammable material. If that stuff were to catch fire, then the blocking of access to the cabinet is even more definitive, and deadly.
An extinguisher cabinet being blocked off, even if not fully, can delay access to essential emergency equipment, potentially (or rather, almost definitely) exacerbating the situation. It shouldn’t be the hardest thing to avoid, but consider adding it to the agenda for your future risk assessments. Also consider what would be strategic locations for cabinets and extinguishers to be placed. That last thing could be addressed through a fire safety survey.
4. Spread the Word! (Employee Training)
This is another point that can be applied to everything in this list. Inadequately trained staff can hinder the effectiveness of an emergency response, so regular and involved training is essential. This should also involve making sure employees know both where the extinguisher cabinets are, and exactly what’s in them.
Practices should include not blocking the cabinets, as we’ve already discussed. A maintenance routine should also be factored in, but this is perhaps better suited to a designated team or individual. Also, conducting fire drills is as invaluable as ever here, as it will make sure your employees are capable of accessing the cabinets quickly and effectively. Much in the same vein as correct signage, familiarity with the cabinets accelerates vital decision-making.
To quickly bundle in what could have been its own point on this list, it’s worth mentioning that extinguisher cabinets should be coherently integrated with your other fire safety systems. This means that their placement should be coordinated with the usage of fixtures such as alarms and sprinklers. Emergency evacuation plans should also incorporate them and their relation to these other devices.
5. Keep it Light, Keep it Right!
Last but not least: how to store items in an extinguisher cabinet responsibly. Let’s start with a caveat: there’s no legal requirement to store only extinguishers in these cabinets. It’s actually a good idea to keep any kind of suitably-sized firefighting equipment in them. This is aided by the specific red hue they employ, as it is the same red that is seen across all of that equipment, and of course, fire extinguishers especially.
What should be carefully avoided is the overfilling of the cabinets. They do have a weight limit, especially in regard to wall-mounting, and, well, there is a space limit too. We do strongly advise against keeping other items with extinguishers in the same cabinet. A potential user should be able to open the cabinet and grab the extinguisher without any hindrance.
I mentioned the red colouring the cabinets use, which is important as it makes people think of firefighting equipment. This makes storing non-fire-related items ill-advised as it betrays people’s instinctual expectations, which can be especially problematic if they go to the cabinet as part of an emergency response. For these other miscellaneous uses, we supply a range of different-coloured containers that share the properties of the extinguisher ones.
Closing Words
There are a few other minor things you may need to consider when looking to buy and install a fire extinguisher cabinet, such as matching the cabinet to your intended extinguisher’s dimensions. But those things are hopefully a bit more obvious and interwoven into the process of buying one in the first place. I hope this article gave you some insights into things that aren’t quite as obvious, and will help you feel more secure about your own use of fire extinguisher cabinets now and in the future.
So, if you are feeling more certain about things, then feel free to browse our range of Fire Extinguisher Cabinets here. And, if you want to see our own cabinets from Vigil Products in greater detail, then check out the helpful video below. Thanks for reading!
