There are mainly four types of fire extinguisher which are suitable for use in your home:
- Water
- Foam
- Dry Powder (ABC rated)
- Carbon Dioxide (CO2)
Also, with the emergence of smaller wet chemical fire extinguishers, households are starting to use these for deep fat fryer fires etc, although wet chemical fire extinguishers were originally used only in a professional kitchen environment.
No single type of extinguisher is totally effective on every kind of fire. So before buying a fire extinguisher, it is vital to look carefully at what type of fire it has to be used on.
The following chart shows you what type of extinguisher can be used for the different types of fire risks. Each risk type has a letter associated with it (A, B, C, F), with the exception of electrical risk. Fire extinguishers for sale in the UK are all marked with some of these letters to indicate to the buyer which risk the extinguisher can be used for. Next to these letters the buyer can also see numbers, which indicate how strong the extinguisher is in the relevant category - The higher the number, the bigger a fire the extinguisher can tackle.
