How much do you have to pay for your fire extinguishers and maintenance contracts?

Whatever the amount is, we bet that you wish you didn’t have to spend so much and bet the annual service updates seem to come around far too quickly?

We were following a Linked In group recently and one item that struck us as interesting was that a British Company has developed a fire extinguisher that only needs to be serviced once every 10 years, which means only one service in its 20 year life span.  Sounds good don’t you think?

A further selling point is that you only need one type of extinguisher for use inside your building and one for outside. They have developed a foam based product that can be used on electrical equipment for indoors and a multipurpose powder extinguisher for outside.  Just think of the benefits of staff not knowing which extinguisher to reach for because there is only one choice to cover many businesses.

The information available indicates that all the extinguishers would need is a yearly inspection check that can be done by your own staff after some simple training.  As there are no metal parts, the normal corrosion problems do not exist. The product is also said to be environmentally friendly, which is another benefit.

Ultimately this extinguisher really looks like a game changer for the fire extinguisher industry.

Current regulations require annual servicing of fire extinguishers so some changes in legislation are likely to be needed; how this is revisited by the current industry will be interesting to watch.  What we do know is that the UK is the only European country we have worked in that requires annual servicing, whereas most of Europe is every two years (which seems more sensible to us).  However, this takes this a massive step forwards and could no doubt provide sensible cost savings for most businesses.

A word of caution though – there are some much inferior Chinese copies out there (what a surprise) and will not perform in the same way.

We will look to keep an eye on how this progresses and keep you all informed.

More information on the product can be found at www.servicefreefireextinguisher.co.uk