Well duh, inside the building... It's obviously not an airtight submarine.
My indoor, basement located, oil fired furnace and water heater, here in New England, also draw burn air from the inside of the building.
Are you guys going to tell me it dosen't, just like the 1/2 space breakers that didn't exist?
Barry
not all do though. my propane heater gets it's burn air from the outside.
I agree. Some do, some don't. Variations in installations are huge, especially in different locales.
I lived in a home built in 1980 that had an oil-fired furnace in the garage, 6 feet from a car, with three underground walls, an insulated front wall, and a family room over it, that drew burn air from inside the garage.
I just spent two days in another thread being told I was imagining things in my electrical panel.
Or... I base my comments on some amount of knowledge (well... sometimes)
Cell phones - and they have precisely *what* to do with what we were discussing. They are a problem at gas pumps, as are ladie's stockings, and truck be liners, but pumping as is a lot different than the garage scenario we were discussing.
Fumes so strong that the idiot closed the windows so it wouldn't get into the house. But... the fool didn't think to open a door to air the place out. Quite an extreme difference from what we were talking about... again.
Little boy burned when *gas spilled* near the water heater.
You should have included the rest of the quote...
" The fires typically occur when consumers use flammable liquids, usually gasoline, for cleaning purposes, or when a flammable liquid leaks or is spilled near the water heater. When the vapors come in contact with the appliance's burner or pilot light, the vapors ignite, causing a severe flashback fire."
Included in those statistics is propane leaks which ignite from pilot lights - or even from... turning on a light switch.
Or less common than you think. It does pay to read what it actually written, and not look for what you want to see in it.
I stand by my original question of your statement that these are common around you.
Humbug. Pay attention to the "according to commission estimates" and all the other fudge words. Strange why they didn't provide actual data. Well maybe not strange, they probably don't have data that specific and combine data from many different cause. Besides 5 deaths and 130 injuries per year is minuscule and fits the description of highly uncommon. Also note that they say flammable vapors and hint at most are from gasoline. But they have no facts. How many of those were caused by spraying lacquer or shellac or due to some other non-gasoline product.
Note that by their own estimates their is less that one chance in 100 of being killed if you have a garage fire started by a gas water heater, and less than 17 percent chance of injury. Those are excellent odds in any type of accident.
And probably all of those deaths and injuries and fires could be avoided by exercise of a few adult brains. For example, who in their right mind stores gasoline in a garage, who starts or tries to start a gas engine in a closed garage. Or leaves flammable (and Toxic) substances where (untended, problem here?) children can get to them?
BTW, he hasn't seen it because it is rare (that about the same as just doesn't exist).
Mike Berger wrote:
Gotta question that one. Cell phones *don't* generate sparks to ring. The ring tones are digitally generated and d/a converted to an analog signal fed to the speaker in the handset mouthpiece. There has to be more to that story, perhaps a static spark was coincidentally generated simultaneous with the cell phone ringing. All of the fear-mongering regarding cell phones has been the idea that it *might* be *possible* that there would be a spark generated from the battery if it were malfunctioning. Frankly, the fear seems just plain silly when you consider the fact the the pump itself is electronic in nature and the pump housing is hardly hermetically sealed.
While hardly a paragon of rigorous scientific inquiry, the guys at Mythbusters attempted to ignite a gasoline conflagration with a cell phone, they were remarkebly unsuccessful in doing so, despite some very abusive treatment of the cell phone in question.
Perhaps the best explanation comes from the Snopes reference:
"News reports routinely attribute gas pump fires to cell phone use whenever a fire occurs at a service station where such a phone was in use at the time, and police and firefighters at the scene often simply assume the connection between the two to be valid. Later investigations, however, have always shown in such cases that the press reports were wrong, that something else touched off the fires, and the presence of cell phones was coincidental rather than causal. In a world where people are increasingly unwilling to allow even the possibility of something going wrong, however, we're bound to see even more regulations "protecting" us from yet another non-existent threat. "
As a matter of fact, the next page in the same Snopes page: "Update: Yes, we know about the 13 May 2004 gas station fire in New Paltz, New York, that news reports claimed was touched off by a cell phone. As our paragraph above notes, erroneous reports of this nature are not uncommon, because reporters (and other officials) base them upon assumptions made at the scene rather than upon later, more thorough investigations (which so far have always found something other than cell phones ? usually static electricity ? to be the igniting agent).
In May 2004, PEI posted on its web site the following assessment of the cause of that fire:
PEI has been in contact with the fire marshall in New Paltz, NY to learn more about this incident. It turns out the initial reports were not accurate. Patrick Koch, the fire chief of New Paltz, NY offered PEI this statement:
"After further investigation of the accident scene and another discussion with the victim of the May 13 gasoline station fire in New Paltz, I have concluded the source of ignition was from some source other than the cell phone the motorist was carrying. Although we will probably never know for sure, the source of ignition was most likely static discharge from the motorist himself to the nozzle dispensing gasoline." "
Of course it was a CBS story, so the credibility of the story (or at least the conclusions) is suspect to begin with.
Others have discussed the other cites
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ If you're gonna be dumb, you better be tough +--------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
Yup. The "cell phone causing gas pump fires" seems to be an urban legend.
See
This is good follow up stuff Mark. I had not ever spent anytime following up on the cell phone hype. I'd certainly heard that it was being given some credible thought, but never followed it any further than that.
BTW - the guys at Mythbusters - "hardly a paragon of rigorous scientific inquiry"? Whatchyou tryin' to say here...
... nothin, I wasn't sayin' nothin'. Didn't mean no disrespect,ya know?
:-)
Actually they do a pretty credible job, but it would be a hard sell to try to use them as fully reliable references because there will always be equal but opposite experts who will question the methodologies or approaches the Mythbusters take in the design of their experiments. One of the problems is that they can usually only do one instance of their experiment, so they don't get statistically representative samples. In some cases, that's not an issue because they are trying to demonstrate something, if it works once, they have achieved their goal, if it doesn't, that doesn't necessarily prove the negative.
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ If you're gonna be dumb, you better be tough +--------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
Sometimes that is more than sufficient ... stubbing your toe, hitting your thumb with a hammer, laying a fat girl ...
On 1/5/2006 7:00 PM Mike Berger mumbled something about the following:
Must be an awful lot of gas fumes then since gasoline needs approx a
14:1 ratio for combustion (litte more, little less works, but not a whole lot more/less). With a typical 2 car garage having about 3000 cu ft of space, that means it would need about 200 cu ft of fumes, which is an awful lot of gasoline to create that amount of fumes. Remember, it isn't gasoline itself that is flammable, it's the fumes.
That's combustion. A lot of hydrocarbon vapors have a LEL (lower explosion limit) concentration of about 1 to 1.5 percent by volume in air. Let's use 1 percent as an example since I don't have a calculator and will be doing the limited math in my head. That 1 percent is about 30 cubic feet of vapor in your garage.
One pound mole of a material occupies about 360 cu ft at standard temperature and pressure. So 30 cubic feet is about 1/12 of a pound mole. Something like benzene has a molecular weight of 78, so a pound mole of benzene weighs 78 lbs. 1/12 of 78 is about 6.5 lbs, which is just about a gallon of benzene. (I think benzene is about 6.2 lbs/gal, but not sure on this.)
The other consideration is just where you knock the can over in relationship to the ignition source. If it is at the far end of the garage, a gallon of benzene will probably not reach LEL near the pilot light. Knock it over next to the pilot light, and you'll be doing your impression of a flaming marshmallow.
Science, the other red meat.
Regards, Roy
Geeze I just wanted an opinion on using a woddstove in my garage. I didn't expect all this debate. I gues what I gather from all this malarchy is that I can put the stove in the garage, just as long as I don't use gasoline by the gallon for cleaning the oil spills, RIGHT? I figured on the "ole' guys in here to say, "Iv'e been using a stove in my garage for 50 years" or the like. And I still didn't get a rebuttal on my mobility base question.
Thanks
Searcher, Still searching for an answer
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