The man who did the home inspection to help us prepare for selling the house in the next year or so pointed out our fire extinguisher and suggested that it was old and should be replaced. It had been charged in 1976. We bought it because it was required to have in the home if you took in foster children. According to the gauge, it was still charged just fine. I didn't see the point of a new one. Ah well, home buyers are likely to object as well. Perhaps the gauge is stuck and the thing is now useless. I wonder how many years it was useless?
It worked fine, and I had fun practicing with it. I've got another on the tool bench, at least a decade newer. I'll try and get the granddaughters over for emptying that one.
Fire training was fun. You needed to be thorough with the wood pile--nooks and crannies hid fire. The oil barrel was simple--up to the point where the drum got hot enough to immediately re-ignite the oil. Lots of things only seem simple.
ReplyDeleteSome people have too much fun
The powder can clump and not dispense. Doesn't necessarily mean that it will, odds are that the thing will work fine, but why take the chance. I tend to leave the "expired" one nearby when the replacement is mounted. At the moment all of them are waiting for my call to the recall-line, as I've managed to abrade the printing off of most of the potentially recalled ones. Having read the number of problems vs the number of units sold, I'd actually be quite surprised if any of them didn't work as intended.
ReplyDeleteAt one place where I worked it was regular maintenance to flip the things upside down and whack them with a rubber mallet to make sure the powder was loose.
We were a couple years in a rental home recently where the inspection tag on the extinguisher was "too old" according to the town laws. It was a nice young couple who owned the duplex as their first home and first experience as landlords, so I mentioned it to them and also said "and no one will care about this as long as we are tenants, so you don't need to worry about it again until we leave."