Yup, loads - especially when I was in the Royal Navy, in training and a couple of incidents where cabinet electronics took to smoking badly. There was a special bayonet type connection to the cabinet and I just plugged the in CO extinguisher and pulled the trigger - it was noisy but that’s about all.
I’ve put out a couple of waste basket fires out with gas/water extinguishers - the run off was a pain to clear up.
Also had a motor burning out on a large industrial washer - used a dry powder extinguisher on that one - this was in an infection control zone so the machine was in an isolated area with a couple of others, now that was a real mess - white powder absolutely everywhere and also had real problems breathing - took a few days to get over the effects of it. Lesson is, don’t use dry powder extinguishers in confined areas.
Had a fire in one of the large gas dryers, extinguisher wasn’t powerful enough so we had to use fire hoses, also had a pile of very hot but not quite dry clothes spontaneously set alight - the staff operating the dryers had reduced the cooling down cycle - the fire was in the main dryer drum and we had to botch rig it to tip the load out on to the unload conveyor (did I tell you it was a very large industrial dryer?) oh yes, we were able to then fight the fire with extinguishers and fire hoses - it still burned out the conveyor belt and paid us out quite well in overtime to replace it all.
I’ve had to deal with a few electrical fires over the years, the smoke that comes off burning insulation is not at all nice - not recommended
Put out a couple of fires in prison workshops - just drench with gas/water devices.
Also just had a soil steriliser burn out - it had been loaded with used peat but had been left on, so when it dried out the temperature just skyrocketed - that really did stink bad, just used a water extinguisher on that one/
'69 VW bus fifteen minutes after I bought it – kaboomski! Just used a shovel and shoulder dirt to put out the flames.
2 dr Ford Pinto – small engine fire while filling up – used my own extinguisher rather than the gas station’s. The fun part was watching my drunken buddy in the back seat frantically try to get out of the vehicle.
I have used them in training many times and once to put out a small trashcan fire on board the ship.
I was part of fire fighting teams in the Navy and when I was an HVAC mechanic at a hospital. Since then I have only trained with fire extinguishers twice more.
I’m out of practice in fire fighting but do keep up my CPR/AED training.
Yep. A few years back I got rear-ended when I had to stop quick because the asshole in front of me slammed on his brakes because of blowing newspapers. The person who hit me was a female former-student driving a Honda. Braking sharply had raised the back of my truck just enough to put the trailer hitch right through her grill and radiator. Barely a scratch on my Nissan, but her engine caught fire and I had to deploy the fire extinguisher. Since her car was totaled, I emptied the thing into the engine compartment. Let the insurance guys clean it up.
I managed to start a carburetor fire in my Jeep Grand Wagoneer. When I saw the flames, I ran to the trunk of my Mustang, got the Halon fire extinguisher out, and gave the fire the tiniest of squirts, which instantly extinguished it.
I’ve used a fire extinguisher once, when I was a teenager. It was in the snack bar of my high school stadium. There wasn’t a fire or anything, me & some other boys broke in there during the summer while drunk and for some reason thought it would be a good idea to set it off. Presumably the custodial staff cleaned it up after they discovered the break in, but I never heard anything about it.
When I was 17 I worked at a self-serve gas station. One night a VW Beetle billowing smoke pulled in right up to the pumps. I ran over, grabbed an extinguisher, and put out the small fire (his back seat was smoldering).
It worked well!
ETA: I hit a police/fire button on my way from my booth to the car. Police showed up and requested a firetruck. The owner of the car was pissed off that I woulkdn’t help clean up his car ( I wasn’t supposed to leave the booth, except for emergencies).
Never, but I’m reminded of my favourite safety brief for an event I was at, which ran in part:
"After last year’s incident when some people set a fire extinguisher off for a laugh, we had to pay £50 to have it refilled, so if you set one off when it’s not an emergency, there’s a £50 charge.
But if you split between 5 of you, that’d only be £10 each, and they’re great fun!"
Only in training. I think I probably could use one in an emergency, but there’s a narrow range of fires where I would, rather than some other method: Too small, and I’d be likely to use something closer at hand like a pan lid, and too large, and I’d be calling the professionals instead of trying to deal with it myself.
Years ago I was visiting a buddy to check out his new apartment. During the Grand Tour, I noticed a fire extinguisher hanging in the closet.
About a month later I was back there, grilling in the parking lot with a few other friends. Suddenly we noticed flames shooting up from the dashboard of one of the guys’ vehicles. Someone said to the apartment dweller, “You got a fire extinguisher?”. He said, “No!”. I said, “Yes you do!”.
I ran into the apartment, grabbed it out of the closet, and put out the fire. The car ended up being totaled.
I also used one several times over the years in work training sessions in parking lots.
mmm
couple of times.
The first time was on my car. Had a Pontiac Phoenix that caught a plastic grocery bag on the exhaust riiiiight where the fuel line had a little rubber section in it (fuel lines ran next to exhaust to prevent winter woes). It made a hell of a mess, but I managed to get the driveway and the neighbors car cleaned up in short order, and I don’t think he ever knew about it (lived in a duplex with a shared driveway at the time)
The second time was maybe not so much use and not so much on purpose. I was replacing halon bottles with CO2 bottles in a vehicular system when I was in the army. I had the driver of this particular vehicle assisting me in the turret. A small “ting” and an “OH SHI-” and we both came popping out of that thing like we were fired from the main gun.
Only for training, but I’ve had other fire-extinguishing training that I did put in practice.
On several occasions, I’ve had to deal with minor situations which were made much worse by people who’d lost their nerves, or where calming down someone who thankfully had at least been able to go into hysterics in a relatively non-dangerous fashion was the most-complex part of dealing with an accident or fire. Safety training is invaluable simply for the difference that knowing what to do produces on most people: even if the thing to do happens to be “run away”, most trained personnel will be capable of doing it without losing their heads.
In high school, water extinguishers may or may not have been used in a surprise offensive during a truly epic boys-against-the-girls game of capture the flag. I can neither confirm nor deny rumours that I was the miscreant who came up with the idea and lead the charge.
Fact: High school boys are afraid of water. That’s why it’s so hard to make them shower regularly.
I will give my former self credit for having been the one to alert the church office that the extinguishers needed to be checked and re-charged, after my fellow miscreants hung them inconspicuously back on the hooks.
I was working graveyard shift in a hotel. We had a microwave oven in the lobby, which customers could use. A guy came in with a hamburger, and wanted to re-heat it.
The burger was inside one of those wrappers that is paper on one side, and foil on the other. The foil made sparks. The sparks lit the paper. It made a merry little blaze inside the microwave.
Putting out the fire was kind of comical. Cleaning up the powder was annoying. Explaining everything to my boss the next morning was amusing.
I recall we stole one from our school back in West Texas and played around with spraying it. We weren’t worried about any possible fires in the school, because they had other extinguishers, plus we would have liked for the school to burn down anyway. To our disappointment, it never did.
Each year our apartment building holds fairly in-depth emergency drills: CPR/AED, navigating smoke-filled rooms, carrying injured people, using the alert systems, prepping emergency ration kits, and putting out fires with an extinguisher.
I have never used one in anger, but have used them many times in training, both in the military and in civilian life.
We were trained mostly with burning oil and gasoline, and I noticed that the powder ones seemed to do the job quicker than the CO2 ones, but that might have just been my imagination.
One high point of Navy training: putting out a swimming pool filled with burning oil using only water from fire hose. We all know that you should never try to put out burning oil with water, right? In that extreme scenario it worked, using the technique we were trained to use.
