So, I’ve been seeing adverts for fire blankets on YouTube. They show people calming putting a fire blanket over a stovetop fire and it’s out.
Are they really all that? do they work? is it worth having one in the kitchen?
They work just fine, they’re pretty standard fire safety items.
I’m sure they work fine when deployed properly, but one thing I’d be worried about is someone doing it in a rushed panic and knocking over the flaming pot, spilling the flaming contents everywhere. It looks pretty simple to use, but unless someone trains with it regularly, they may freak out when it’s time to use it and mess up. My personal opinion is that a fire extinguisher is going to be safer in real world situations because I think people are more likely to use that properly in this situation rather than a fire blanket.
The concern I’ve heard with fire extinguishers is that with a grease fire, the force of the extinguisher may just spread the oil around, rather than put it out?
The typical concern with grease fires is drunken cooks doing this:
In any case the extinguisher used should therefore not just shoot a stream of water and spread the burning oil everywhere; you will want a “Class F” or K rated extinguisher:
One big point in favor of fire blankets is that they’ll work on any kind of fire. I mostly see them in chemistry labs, for that reason.
The purpose of a fire blanket is to contain the fire, so it can be put out before it spreads.
How many fire extinguishers have you personally discharged either for real or in training? And even if you’ve done it a lot, I’ll bet 95+%, maybe even 99%, of Dopers or of the public at large have never in their life discharged a fire extinguisher.
OTOH, all of us have spread a cloth over a surface. Whether setting out placemats or tablecloths, making a bed, or throwing a tarp over a [whatever].
IMO a blanket is far MORE likely to be used correctly than an extinguisher by someone with zero training who’s suddenly startled by a fire they triggered.
Yep, fire blankets are great for grease fires.
Not only are they safe, and efficient, but fairly often you can even “save the bacon”.
I worked my way thru college as security, then as a park ranger. I used them fairly often.
But fire blankets are much better for grease fires. Baking soda isnt a bad idea.
They will smother a small grease fire, like in a frying pan.
In various training and refresher courses I’ve probably fired off 30 or 40 of 'em. Even put out many gas jet “fires” with them. But never for real.
They’re not idiot proof and they’re even less panicky idiot proof.
Very true.
I’ve set out lots of placemats but the table has never been on fire when I’ve done such. 
If you have a stove top fire & have a microwave mounted above the stove doesn’t one need to get fairly close to the flames to get that blanket placed in the right area, closer to the flames than they need to be with a fire extinguisher?
I’d think they may be better if you’re the calm type but not if one is of a panicky or fearful personality.
Fire blankets don’t expire either, unlike $50 kitchen fire extinguishers that sit for years on the kitchen wall, the charge needle barely in the green and dubious if it will work when needed. Most ppl aren’t diligent about swapping out unused extinguishers at the end of their life, especially given the cost.
Thanks for the comments everyone. I will go looking for one.
ETA: in response to @Spiderman 3 posts up. Other folks snuck in while I was bloviating.
An interesting set of questions.
The couple of times I’ve started a grease fire in a pan the flames weren’t all that impressive. 6-12" or so. Scary, but not the sort of thing you’d need to stand 6 feet away from to avoid radiant heat burns.
For naturally anxious or panicky (not the same thing, but semi-adjacent) people, there is no great answer. Training, even DIY-self training, is the only effective remedy I know of for panic, and even that varies a lot in effectiveness depending on the personality.
Will an anxious or panicky person buy a fire suppression device at all or is the thought of a fire just too anxiety-producing? If they buy it, will they practice with it? Hard to say.
I will say that practicing with extinguishers gets expensive since most home ones are sold as single-shot non-refillables. And even the refillable ones cost money and hassle to refill. Whereas blankets can be practiced with extensively.
I don’t know that there’s a solid answer here.
When this thread first came up I wanted to page one of our resident firefighters. I had misremembered his handle so searching wasn’t finding him. Let’s try again now that I’m remembering correctly: Hey @KCB615, do you have any professional words of wisdom on this topic?
I actually just got one for Christmas. My dad used to run disaster simulations for certain provincial and municipal governments and kind of has safety on his mind. I guess I’m hard to shop for so this is what he came up with. 
We’ve had fire extinguisher for the kitchen for years. The first kitchen fire we had (wife forgot the blender was on the glass top oven and turned on the wrong burner), there was a bit of panic and the offending burning item was grabbed and tossed outside on the snowy deck. Oops! I think there may have been issues even if she remembered we had the extinguisher. The smaller kitchen ones only have a few seconds of use and it does need to be directed fairly accurately to put out the fire. Not to mention the clean-up that is necessary after. The blanket can be grabbed and repositioned, kept on the flames until they are smothered, and no extra mess to clean. I’m putting it as probably a good investment.
Water cans only use water & some air; we use a small plug-in compressor. We carry them on the apparatus & use them sometimes & have a training with them in the rotation, albeit less frequently than some other things. While not identical to ABC fire extinguishers they are similar in how they operate. We let the public play with them at Fire Prevention Week expo in Oct; you may be able to go to your local fire station & play with them there
Thanks for the invite, @LSLGuy !
As to the OP, I’m not a fan of fire blankets. You need to get too close to the fire to use it, and you lose visibility of the fire while you’re deploying it. It also only works if you can cover the stuff that’s burning, so if the cabinets above the stove are on fire you’re out of luck. There also a decent chance of knocking a pan of burning stuff off of the stove as you try to put a blanket on it. That takes the fire from one square foot to 10 square feet, and it’s surrounding you.
That said, I’m not a huge fan of fire extinguishers in untrained hands, either. I’ve taught hundreds of adults over the years how to use a fire extinguisher. Most of the time we used dry chemical extinguishers (as that’s what they’d be using in the real world, and I had dozens and dozens of them to use for training). The same things were noticed by pretty near everyone who used a dry chemical extinguisher: wow, this stuff tastes terrible (super ammonia taste and smell), and I can’t see what I’m doing with the cloud it makes. We did all of our training outdoors where the wind clears the cloud away quickly; discharge a dry chemical extinguisher in your kitchen and you’ll be horrified at the lack of visibility and the sudden absence of breathable air for the next 3 minutes.
Extinguisher use by trained hands is better, obviously, but exactly what constitutes “trained” is another question. Used an extinguisher once in a class in a parking lot 14 years ago, while cow-orkers laughed and giggled? Sorry, that’s not trained. Discharge an extinguisher every 6 months on a live fire? Ok, you have my attention. The latter is very rare to find, even amongst firefighters. There is a benefit of an extinguisher over a blanket - you have a chance of at least knocking down fire beyond the pan of origin.
So since I’ve pooh-poohed the fire blankets and extinguishers, what is a home chef to do with a cooking fire? Use the lid for the pan you’re cooking with. I always, without fail, have a lid next to the stove if I’m cooking something that can ignite. My 15 year old daughter does the same, as her OCD father insisted. See the fire, put the lid on the pan, and turn the burner off. Then wait. Don’t touch it, let it sit. If you disturb the pan or the lid opens up you have a chance for reignition. If the flames touched the cabinets or the microwave above the stove, call 911 and invite some new friends with funny hats over to see your recipie fail. You may need their help anyways to clear smoke (you’d be amazed at the all-permeating stench of a cooking mishap).
Lid first, then dry chem. Leave the blanket on the bed or couch.
Yes, but the blanket is there to protect you, too.
I can attest to this. Every year I take a fire safety training course at work - but really it’s just a short online course with some interactive segments and a final quiz. There was a time when they actually took us out in the parking lot and had us use a real fire extinguisher to put out a real fire, but I only ever remember that happening once.
I have only had one occasion to use a fire extinguisher to deal with an actual unplanned fire. I grabbed the extinguisher from its wall mount, set it on the floor, and tried to pull the pin. I say “tried,” because in my duress and urgency I was pre-squeezing the trigger handle without realizing it, which prevented me from actually removing the pin. It was at least five seconds of thinking “why can’t I get this fucking pin out”, while the fire grew bigger, before I realized that I was my own worst enemy and relaxed my death grip on the extinguisher.
I kind of feel like that’s an important flaw in the training I’ve been receiving. I see YouTube videos that show people grabbing only the lower handle while they pull the pin; there ought to be an explicit instruction about not grabbing the upper (trigger) handle during this step, as it’s kind of a natural way to grip the extinguisher.