Take one household item that you have in your home

Take one household item that you have in your home (ie, furniture, cleaning products, etc.) and discuss the flammable properties of the item and the associated fire hazards.

• Your post should be a minimum of three paragraphs.

——————————————————————————————————-

#1

While searching for a household product to write about in this weeks forum, I decided that I wanted to steer away from the commonly known combustables.  This would include furniture items, electrical appliances, and cooking apparatus. However, during my early research I came across an article on a page operated by an insurance company named “Hippo.” This insurance company’s article states that the NFPA (National Fire Protection Agency) released the statistic that approximately ten thousand home fires yearly see a mattress as the first item to burn.  Surprised by the statistic, I decided to select this as my research item. I believe that by better understanding the item first involved in a large number of home fires yearly I better understand other factors in dwelling fires and the rate they spread at.

According to the NFPA on their own website, today’s furniture is made with primarily with polyester materials.  Polyester is chemically made with a mixture of petroleum, coal, oxygen, and water. All fuels must be in a gaseous state to burn.  Petroleum, typically used in jet fuel, is highly flammable. It’s high level of flammability is due to the property of turning into a vapour (gaseous state) at a very low temperature.  Additionally coal is made up of carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen. Hydrogen is able to ignite and the oxygen found throughout the polyester is a component of the fire triangle/tetrahedron.

In conclusion, polyester is in high quantity in furniture items, which makes for a supply of easily flammable vapours to be released when exposed to even low heat.  The size of most furniture pieces contributes to creating a large body of fuel. To better understand how these two factors affect the growth of fire, I watched several simulation/controlled burn videos on the NFPA’s same page.  In one video, a single room with only one arm chair goes from ignition to flashover conditions in about five minutes. In another simulation video the room with a full living room set is fully involved in well under three minutes. A third video shows a mattress inside a typical bedroom as the ignition point, and the romat flashover point only three minutes later.  The collective point demonstrated from the three videos is that the polyester material provides enough fuel and burns quick enough to create an IDLH environment likely before any municipality fire apparatus is able to get out of quarters.