I have always been bothered leaving my freezer on when house vacant with holidays. More so now in the aftermath of the Grenfell fire. A bit heath robinson but how realistic would it be to sit a couple of large plastic buckets of water on top of the freezer thinking they would melt and (maybe) extinquish the fire. The freezer is the only item left on when on hols.
I tested polythene bags filled with water to see if they could extinguish fire. To my surprise, no they couldn't, even direct flame did not melt them. The water protects the plastic.
Which reminds me of the old trick of boiling water in a folded paper container. As long as you keep the flame away from the paper above the waterline I gather it works.
I'd not bother. By the time they melted there would be so much fire it would be like pissing on it.
to be honest, most freezers are safe as long as you observe the ventilation requirements and have a sensible breaker of some sort. All I can say is we don't know enough about the failure mode of the fridge mentioned to do much. Look at the figures though. The odds against anything serious happening are ridiculous. More likely to find some pest biting through a cable and causing a fire or of having something break down and doing the same, after all unless you turn all the house off there are live wires all over the place. Brian
Low melting point paraffin wax melts at 55%c. You can buy this from hobbyist candle making suppliers.
You can lower the melting point even further by first melting the wax, removing it from the flame and adding more paraffin.
At the simplest level if you drilled say 10mm holes in the bottom of your bucket, plugged these holes with wax and then filled the bucket with water then that should do the trick. Although presumably you'd need the water directed as closely as possible towards the source of the fire, not just going antwhere.
It might be advisable to move the f/ff well away from the wall and the socket into which you could maybe fit an RCD adapter, which may help limit the damage by cutting off the supply that bit quicker.
Thinking further if you had a large enough length of large diameter pipe you could instead plug this with wax, position that end that much nearer to the likely source of the fire and have a directed stream. Or a tank with narrower pipe(s) perhaps.
You'd probably need to do some work on the applicable temperature ranges - the maximum at the back of the f/ff and the actual measured melting point of the wax.
However
First up, you can check the figures for yourself but I'm pretty sure I read a reputable source based on Fire Service figures suggesting there were only about 350 fridge/freezer or freezer fires a year. Whether this was the UK or just England I can't remember. Basically such fires are newsworthy and so feature prominently on social media because its seems contrary to common sense that a f/ff can catch fire.
If that stat is correct then thats one fire a day as against the number of f/ff's actual in use in the UK which must run into millions.
And that one a day presumably includes a fair proportion resulting from human error, dodgy plugs and sockets etc rather than faulty design as such.
Of the faulty designs the Beko's were carching fire because the defrost heaters weren't turning themselves off. So if you don't have auto-defrost that's one less thing to worry about. While the precise nature of the fault in the Grenfell Hotpoint FF175BP has yet to be identified as that model hasn't been subject to any previous scares or recalls. Although it had a reputation for blowing fuses according to the Express. So again if you f/ff has never blown a fuse that's probably one less thing to worry about.
And again, apparently 64,000 units of that particular Hotpoint model have been sold. And this is the first one to catch fire. As if this hadn't been the case, then the scaremongering Express article would have been shouting it from the rooftops.
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