Through our research and testing, we found some red flags regarding fire sprays’ reliability. We even experienced problems firsthand: When we popped the cap off one can, the nozzle fell out and onto the ground, rendering the extinguisher completely useless. Now imagine if that had happened during a real emergency.
Also, none of the experts we spoke with had much good to say about aerosol extinguishers. During an interview, Timothy Sendelbach, former editor-in-chief of Firehouse Magazine, said he “strongly oppose[s] this type of extinguisher,” saying they get “inverted during use, which makes them inoperable.”
In an interview, John Drengenberg, then of UL, an organization that sets globally recognized safety standards, told us, “We don’t even think they should be called fire extinguishers.” He pointed out that one of the aerosol design’s main flaws is that “there is no little gauge on it to see if the pressure inside is adequate to the task at hand.”
Not only are there more opportunities for an aerosol extinguisher to fail during use, but you can’t even purchase them in California, Nevada, or New York. According to a support article on First Alert’s site, in those states “existing laws and regulations require that all types of portable fire extinguishing devices include additional product features, such as pressure gauges and more traditional valves.” So those states don’t trust aerosol extinguishers, either.
In addition, we could find only one model that had been tested to any kind of third-party safety standards. We see this as a requirement for a fire extinguisher and wouldn’t recommend anything not certified to the most recent UL safety standards.
This is not to say that traditional fire extinguishers are never prone to malfunction—there have been extinguisher recalls in the past. However, we’d much rather take our chances with an established design that has been vetted by a third party.
