Only in America - diyfail #34368

Although, thinking about it, I have nearly burnt my own house down once or twice, and you do feel pretty stupid when you realise what you might have done.

TW

My Dad felt that way after using a blowlamp to thaw out an alkathene pipe to an outside tap to obtain water for some livestock one winter , in retrospect attempting do so inside a hayshed was a bit silly. He never expected the pipe to ignite and the flame to travel up the outside of the frozen pipe and then start to drop flaming plastic fragments. Fortunatly loss was confined to some low quality old hay more suitable for bedding and some corrugated iron panels with supporting woodwork and a couple of wooden ex telegraph pole supports all easily replaced.

G.Harman

Good one. Some years ago I put a small extension on my house. One of the final jobs was to sand and oil the new floorboards which I did with a mate and we put the dust from the sander and the old abrasive sheets and oily rags in a bin liner which I placed outside just to get it out of the way. Several days later I was sitting of a dark evening at the kitchen table reading the paper when I noticed a large fire just outside the back door. Now I had read Bleak House and I had read the warning on the Danish Oil cans but I had never really believed in spontaneous combustion until I saw it with my own eyes. The contents of the bin liner had been oxidising, heating up and beginning to smoulder for days. The actual conflagration was very fast and quite dramatic. if I had left it and gone out, or left it indoors or in the shed - Blimey! TW

Oh, I don't know, In a factory I worked at in the 60s the workmen came to fix some plumbing in a cavity in the roof space and burned the factory down, complete with a lot of TVs in it. You could hear the tubes banging several miles away. Brian

When a friend's shed burned down, the fire brigade's opinion was that it was started by spontaneous combustion of oily rags.

I have never seen that, but ceratinly piles of grass cuttings get VERY warm and smoke - that is a acre and a half of them do :-)

Pretty silly thing to do, did he have the right to bare arms in that state if so he could have hired a canon/nuclear weapon or something and blasted it into the middle of next week :-)

Maybe there's a link between stupidity and mobile homes.

Somewhat different. My mother burnt out my parents' bedroom and smoke damaged everything upstairs in the 70s. She nipped up and plugged in the electric blanket, but had picked up the wrong plug. She'd actually plugged in a Pifco combined UV/infra-red lamp that was folded shut and stored under the bed. It was designed to turn off if it was knocked over or closed, but they'd used a mercury switch ... which didn't protect it if it was also upside down!

It was lucky that I was awake and reading or the fire might not have been caught for a lot longer. As it was, I thought it was just the toaster burning some toast at first and finished the chapter before investigating.

My father was on a business trip and got the scare of his life as he arrived home and found three fire engines outside!

SteveW

Phosphine gas? Usually associated with stored green hay.

Plenty of oily rags in my workshop.

Apart from welding and grinding sparks, the only smouldering paper towel that frightened me was used to tidy up after a glass fibre job. The oxidiser does just that!

When I were a lad I discovered the hairy hessian cover under the sette and further discovered that applying a lit match to it the flame ran rather prettil across the surface.