"Richard Beale plays the lead role in one of the UK's leading health and safety training and consultancy services working with companies throughout the UK and abroad. His enthusiasm for his subject, along with many years experience in the industry has earned him the right to speak on this important subject. Each month, Richard will be sharing with us principles fundamentals and concepts that can keep us safe at home and in the workplace."


Fire extinguishers,
Have you seen fire extinguishers in shops, cars maybe at your homes and never really known how to use them? Here we are going to look at fire extinguishers in details. We will look at where you should place them both in the home and at work, what types you should have and how to use them correctly.

Introduction:
Fire Extinguishers are merely tools for a specific job. They have one purpose in life and one purpose only. You have all seen them and probably all thought that if needed you would be able to use them effectively, which to some extent you probably could as they are designed for ease of use, however by the time you had read the instructions it will often be too late.

Which extinguisher do I need?
In the UK we have 5 different types of extinguisher, Water, Foam, CO2, Powder and Wet Chemical.


The latter extinguisher is mainly used for commercial kitchens and as such I will not go into detail (should you require more information please feel free to contact us)
In order to understand which extinguisher to use we need to understand the different types of fire, these are broken down into classes (A, B, C, D and F)

Class A Fires: Carbon Solids, ie paper, wood and textiles
Class B Fires: Flammable Liquids.
Class C Fires: Flammable Gases
Class D Fires: Metals
Class E Fires: Involve Electricity
Class F Fires: Cooking oils and Fats

Having an understanding of the above helps to identify which extinguisher should be used for which fire, it is vital that you use the correct extinguisher for the type of fire as using the wrong extinguisher could have devastating effects. The table below is a good quick reference guide to the types of extinguisher and which class of fire they should be used on. As you can see the table also identifies the colours of extinguishers. Remember the days when fire extinguishers were Red, Blue, Cream and Black? Now they are all red due to European laws, however in the UK we can put a colour label on the cylinder body to identify quickly the type of extinguisher as detailed below:

Why is this important?
You may think that the classes of fire are dull information, however get this wrong and it could have devastating consequences. I often hear stories from fire officers of people mixing the wrong fires with the incorrect types of extinguishers. A recent example is of a fire in a kitchen, when the fire crews arrived there was large volumes of smoke bellowing from the kitchen and they were greeted with someone sitting outside with burns up his arms and neck. What had gone wrong? You can probably guess. He put water onto the chip pan whilst it was alight, in this day and age of educating the public I would have thought this to be a rare occurrence however you would be surprised how common this is.


Type - Old Code - BS EN 3 Colour Code - Fire Class
Water - Signal Red - Signal Red - A
Foam - Cream - Red with a Cream panel above the operating instructions - A, B
Dry Powder - French Blue - Red with a Blue panel above the operating instructions - A, B, E
Carbon Dioxide CO2 - Black - Red with a Black panel above the operating instructions - B, E
Wet Chemical - No F Class - Red with a Canary Yellow panel above the operating instructions - A, F

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