Fire extinguisher recommendation

[MusicalPhotog]

All certainly good information. Thanks. I now understand that I develop film in a death trap! :-D

[Bob Salomon]

Ansel Adams' dark room in Yosemite burned down IIRC. I don't recollect the cause of the fire, but certainly the possibility should be a concern.

When my daughter got married we had Monte Zucker and Clay Bannister photograph the wedding. They did a hell of a job!
However we never got any prints, only proofs. We lived in N NJ and their studio was in Silver Springs, MD.

The day after we received the proofs his studio burned down, everything was lost, including the negatives!

A few days later in NJ another Master Photographers studio also burned down as did a few others.

Turned out that they all used McDonalds sprays in a spray booth to finish their prints. The sprays left a flammable residue inside the spray booths and the exhaust fan shorted out setting the residue on fire which burned down the studios. Most of the fires occurred at night when the studios were closed so no one was harmed but an awful lot of high end portraits, weddings, bar Mitzvahs photographs were lost!

[Drew Wiley]

Lacquers! We had explosions in the neighborhood that caused a bigger mess in the warehouses than our strongest earthquakes. What lacquers do to the brain over time is even worse. Flammable lacquers are illegal for pro cabinet shop use; but there's still a lot of amateur and bootleg use of them. It can be suicide without explosion-proof equipment. At one point they were being made just three blocks away. It felt like the start of a nuclear war. Got outdoors and saw a huge cloud. A rail tanker car of lacquer thinner had totally vaporized, along with the guy pumping it. But almost miraculously, his cigarette lighter was found on the ground next to the tracks. Photo lacquer is a bit different, butyl acetate instead of nitrocellulose, but equally nasty. And yes, I do remember when Monty Zucker had to start over after the fire.

[Bob Salomon]

Lacquers! We had explosions in the neighborhood that caused a bigger mess in the warehouses than our strongest earthquakes. What lacquers do to the brain over time is even worse. Flammable lacquers are illegal for pro cabinet shop use; but there's still a lot of amateur and bootleg use of them. It can be suicide without explosion-proof equipment. At one point they were being made just three blocks away. It felt like the start of a nuclear war. Got outdoors and saw a huge cloud. A rail tanker car of lacquer thinner had totally vaporized, along with the guy pumping it. But almost miraculously, his cigarette lighter was found on the ground next to the tracks. Photo lacquer is a bit different, butyl acetate instead of nitrocellulose, but equally nasty. And yes, I do remember when Monty Zucker had to start over after the fire.

Back in the very early 60s i partitioned off my garage. Into a wet area, a,drye area, a laundry room and area for garden and yard tools. For a sink I got a 4x9’ sheet of ½” exterior plywood which let me make a 8’ sink wide enough for my largest trays and a small Pako print dryer. I covered all services of the sink with several layers of fibre glass, cut a hole for drain And rain the supply lines for hot and cold across the tile back stop on the wall, I was heating some chemicals in A Paterson graduate with an aquarium immersion heater. It happened to be Thanksgiving and my wife invited friends over and was cooking a large turkey.
After we finished the turkee some friends wanted to see the darkroom and the dry room. They were in the basement and I flicked the fluorescent lights on by the switch at,the head of the stairs, looked,down the staircase,and we could only see a solid wall of grey. This was confusing as the staircase was painted white and the walls were paneled in a very light wood.
We eventually figured out that we were looking at a solid wall of smoke, from the desk room. Called the fire department and they came with their big exhaust fans that cleared it out real fast.

Turned out that the Immersion heater was heating water in a Paterson graduate, the water evaporated a the heater set the plastic graduate on fire. The fire caught some of the plexiglass a light which was directly under the joint in the hot a cold water supply on the wall above the sink. A solder joint was directly above the burning graduate which melted, the solder,sell in the cold,water,pipe,and sprinkled,on the fire and put it out but created a huge cloud of smoke!

[Leszek Vogt]

I think you should be fine with 2A-10B,C ("low hazard"), but you can up yer game and use 3A,40B,C.....rated as "moderate hazard". My personal wisdom comes largely from AF....do it safely and you'll almost never need the FD to respond.

Les

[Tin Can]

I worked in 6 darkroom sized rooms.

Each room had huge negative pressure when active. Roof exhaust.

We had spark, heat rise and temp rise triggers which triggered loud sirens.

For fire suppression, each room had individual large Halon auto dump that triggered 20 seconds after the siren. All ventaations also stopped with shutters closed. Don't be in there. Get out asap.

As backup, we had 180 degree F auto water sprinklers ceiling mounted fed by a huge water tower. No way to turn that off quickly.

Third was hallway hand held fire extinguishers, 4 for every room, so 24 in a 50 foot hallway. Purple K, ABC and CO2.

The entire set of rooms was built outside the last wall of the factory, in a separate container.

10 feet away was 4000 gallons of flammable liquids.

My favorite workplace.

We did have fires.

I often worked alone for 12 hours.

No photography allowed.

[Alan Klein]

All great ideas above. I don;t have a darkroom. But i keep extinguishers (ABC) adjacent to my kitchen and another in the garage by the roll-up door. The men's club I belong to which include members from my 55+ community went to the local fire department's training grounds for a tour. They gave us fire extinguishers to practice on. It's good to try one of them out before you actually need it. Here's the video I took of our tour. The practice section is at 2:24.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcmwLSiS-as

[Alan Klein]

By the way, my Kidde fire extinguishers were recalled. All the plastic top ones had problems going on for over 25 years. Check yours out with the manufacturer. Kidde replaced mine for free.

[Drew Wiley]

Not a single one of what we typically call fire extinguishers, like we'd buy in a hardware store or at a home center or at Costco, would pass an industrial inspection. Those have to be specified and certified for the particular space, and monitored on a routine schedule by a professional service, often in conjunction with alarm and sprinkler inspections. But our own inexpensive extinguishers do have gauges which should be checked from time to time to make sure they haven't lost pressure.

[Alan Klein]

Not a single one of what we typically call fire extinguishers, like we'd buy in a hardware store or at a home center or at Costco, would pass an industrial inspection. Those have to be specified and certified for the particular space, and monitored on a routine schedule by a professional service, often in conjunction with alarm and sprinkler inspections. But our own inexpensive extinguishers do have gauges which should be checked from time to time to make sure they haven't lost pressure.

Professional services don't do more than check the gages and put a label on the extinguisher certifying it was inspected. Even home use extinguishers are "approved" by CSA or UL. So as long as the gages show normal pressure, you ought to be OK for use. Certainly a lot better than having no extinguishers around.