3 Reasons You Need a Fire Extinguisher In Your Home

15 Jan 3 Reasons You Need a Fire Extinguisher In Your Home

No one wants to think about the possibility of needing a fire extinguisher in their home. Everyone always thinks that nothing bad could happen to them or in their home. Some people feel like preparing for a disaster is welcoming the disaster to happen, or admitting that it’s possible that they could experience a fire in their home. However, being prepared for bad situations just helps you minimize the damage in the event of having a fire or small disaster occur inside your home.

Having a plan

When it comes to fires in the home, it’s important to make sure that you have a plan in place. Putting out a fire quickly before it escalates and creates a lot of problems is essential to containing the damage and making sure that everyone in your home stays safe. The best way to respond quickly to a fire, is to have a fire extinguisher close by and easy to access. For this reason, you should have multiple fire extinguishers in key places throughout your house. If there is a fire upstairs, you don’t want to have to run downstairs to the kitchen and dig through the cabinet under the sink to find the fire extinguisher. Making sure there is one close by is essential to containing the fire. It may not seem necessary to have more than one in your home, but if a disaster does  occur, you’ll wish you had more than one.

The best places to keep fire extinguishers in your home

The most obvious place to keep a fire extinguisher, is in your kitchen. Statistically, it’s the room of the house that experiences the most house fires. In addition, most fires that start in the kitchen are caused by cooking mishaps which are commonly caused by grease, which would be hazardous to attempt to put out simply with water. Grease fires have a high flash point and they burn extremely hot. For the kitchen, you’ll want a Class K fire extinguisher for your kitchen. You’ll also want to make sure that it’s at least 30 feet away from the stove, since you won’t want to have to reach through the flames to access the fire extinguisher.

The laundry room is the next place you’ll want a fire extinguisher, as the dryer is another common cause of fires. Make sure you have a fire extinguisher on every floor, as well as one in the garage in case of mechanically caused fires.