Fire Safety Videos for the Garage and Shop

Let's discuss a very serious topic. Inside a shop, inside a home, at your workplace, anywhere you may be, you may encounter a fire. Hopefully you never do, but I strongly recommend that you're prepared for it, if and when you ever have to. You have to understand, there's four basic categories of fire extinguishers, A, B, C, and D. There is also a fifth, K, which is primarily used for cooking oil fires, typically in a commercial restaurant setting. When you're looking at fire extinguishers, you need to not only buy an extinguisher that suits your particular shop needs. This particular fire extinguisher covers both A, B and C type fires. A being a typical organic combustible, whether it'd be wood or paper. B being a fire extinguisher that covers flammable liquids, gasoline, kerosene, liquids like that. C is a fire extinguisher that covers electrical equipment. You never wanna use water on an electrical fire. Water's a very good conductor of electricity, and if you spray water on an electrical fire you really run the risk of shorting the electricity out, possibly getting a voltage zap to the person using the extinguisher. You always need to use caution. Whenever you're dealing with any tools or equipment in the shop. If you're draining a fuel tank, make sure what you drain the fuel into, whether it's diesel or gasoline, make sure you draining into the correct container to hold the fuel. It should be a red gas can for gasoline. Should be a blue can for kerosene. Should be a yellow can for diesel fuel. Whenever you're using anything to heat, let's say you have a rusted component, you can use a small hand torch like this, or you can use a standard oxy-acetylene torch typically formed for cutting steel. No matter what you're using these on, make sure when you're heating up the component you're trying to get free, you're not heating up anything behind the component that could combust and cause a fire. Even something as simple as a soldering gun, and a heat gun, when you're doing a wiring harness repair, always use caution. Any excess heat, can bring a component to its flashpoint and cause it to combust. Again, all fire extinguishers have to be fully charged. Make sure they're charged. When you need it, if you need it, you really depending on the extinguisher to work correctly. Every extinguisher has explicit instructions right on the label. It also has a breakout of the fires that it can be used for. Typical homeowner or garage owner extinguishers will cover A, B and C style fires. Again, I hope you never need to use one, but you have to be prepared just in case you do. When it comes to batteries, correct storage, correct charging is very, very important. Never charge a frozen battery. You're basically putting voltage to an ice cube. You need to make sure you store batteries correctly. If they are the type of wet cell battery, they can leak, always make sure they're stored upright. As with this lithium battery, it can be stored in any direction, but it's good common sense to store it upright. This lithium battery. If you were to have a fire, would fall outside of the range of an A, B or C fire, it would fall into the range of class D, which is exotic metals that will burn. Magnesium, potassium, sodium, lithium, just to name a few, if you deal a lot with lithium batteries, whether it's a motor sports battery, it's a laptop battery, a cell phone battery, it's a real good investment to invest in a class D extinguisher. You may never need to use it, I hope you never need to use one, but if you do, you should be prepared. Again when you're working in the shop, always work clean. Always make sure the walk areas, the floor, the entrances and exits to your shop are always clear. You don't wanna have to come across a fire situation in the shop, that you can't control, without calling the local fire department or some type of emergency assistance. If you can't handle it yourself, you wanna be able to safely exit your shop, your home, your workplace, and wait for emergency personnel to handle the fire at hands.