So we’ve lived in our house for a little over two years now, and we only recently realized that we didn’t own a pretty important piece of homeowner hardware: a fire extinguisher. Except that’s not completely true–the house came with a fire extinguisher (it’s in the basement for some reason). It looks like this:

I promise it doesn't look this good in person

The house was built in the 50′s, and this FE might just be the house’s senior.

Needless to say, we decided we’d just go ahead and get ourselves a brand new FE. Which meant we had options:

1. A 10 lb CO2 extinguisher selling for over $200

2. A 5 lb version of same for $175

3. A 10 lb dry chemical extinguisher for $75

4. A 3 lb dry chemical ‘Kitchen’ extinguisher for $20

Now, of course, you generally get what you pay for. This has proven true for various things we (mostly I, though) have bought for our house (e.g., vintage turntables on eBay). But even considering the pretty extreme range of prices for what seems to not be an extreme range of products, we took home the $20 kitchen FE.

Here’s why. The most likely place a fire will start in our house is in the kitchen–we don’t have a fireplace, we’re not smokers, and we don’t really light candles unless the power goes out. If there’s a fire in our house that can be put out by a FE, it’s probably going to be in the kitchen. And aside from the Co2/dry chemical difference, they all seem to just be larger or smaller versions of the same thing. A good 3 lb FE seems feasible to put out any kind of fire that might start on our electric range stove (if we had a gas stove, a different FE may have made more sense).

We’ve made a place for the FE below our sink with some flower vases and a few cleaners. I imagine it’s SOP to hang the FE on the wall, but our kitchen isn’t so large that we couldn’t open a cabinet pretty quickly. I can just see trying to pull the FE off its wall mount in a hurry and it getting stuck or something.

And, kind of in the same vein, we put some brand new 9V batteries in our smoke detectors (which we thought were so old they didn’t work–turns out they just needed some batteries). 

If you liked this post, then might we suggest:

Breaking the Hex

FLOR Update for the Den

Paint, Molding, Baseboards, and Power Tools

Thresholdin’ It Up

Door Knobs and Broomsticks (Sans Broomsticks)

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