The Best Kitchen Fire Extinguisher (And Where to Keep It)

Do you keep your kitchen fire extinguisher in the kitchen? Yeah, I did, too, until a recent conversation with Captain Michael Kozo, director of the New York City Fire Department’s Fire Safety Education Unit. I’d originally called him to talk about best practices for kitchen smoke detectors—the ideal place to put them, how often to change the batteries, and when you know it’s time to replace the entire unit. I pride myself on changing my smoke detector batteries every year and I have a fire extinguisher on every floor of my home, so I was pretty sure he was just going to confirm everything I already knew. Instead he confirmed that I knew absolutely nothing about kitchen fire safety. Well, almost nothing, because I was right about one thing: A “kitchen” smoke detector should be placed just outside of the kitchen, not in it.

“If the smoke detector is in your kitchen it will go off all the time, and that’s when you’ll start trying to disable it or take it down,” Kozo says. He says that when marshals investigate house fires that start in the kitchen, they often find alarms that either didn’t have a battery at all or had a dead battery.

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To help combat this problem, the NYFD is now recommending that everyone upgrade to 10-year sealed smoke detectors with tamper-resistant lithium batteries. If you (like me) still have the older-style smoke detectors that take 9-volt batteries, you should replace those batteries twice a year. “When you change your clock, you change your batteries,” Kozo says. No matter what type of smoke detectors you have, you should be testing them once a month or more often. “The NFPA [National Fire Protection Association] actually recommends testing them at least once a month,” he says. Oops.

When upgrading smoke detectors, Kozo also recommends looking for one with a dual sensor—a photoelectric sensor to detect smoke and an ionization sensor to detect flames. And like with any electrical product you bring into your home, you should make sure your smoke detector has an ETL or UL rating, which tells you that a national or global certification company has deemed it safe for use.

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Because dual sensor alarms can be extra sensitive (which is a good thing for detecting actual fires), some folks opt to separate the alarms so the ionization detector doesn’t go off every time it detects steam from boiling water. If you go this route, be sure to get both, not just one. And remember: A smoke detector is not a substitute for a carbon monoxide alarm, which Kozo says you should also have on every level of your home (though a combination alarm is fine).

Ionization smoke detectors

Photoelectric smoke detectors with built-in carbon monoxide alarm

Where should I put my kitchen fire extinguisher?

So, what about that kitchen fire extinguisher? It’s important to have one that’s easily accessible when you’re working in the kitchen, that’s for sure. But like a smoke detector, Kozo says a home fire extinguisher should be mounted near the kitchen. “If you have a fire in your kitchen and it starts to spread quickly, you’ll be flailing around trying to find it,” he says. “We recommend keeping it just outside the kitchen so if there’s a fire in the kitchen, you’ll be able to access that extinguisher.”

Source: https://gardencourte.com
Categories: Kitchens