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Don’t burn your house down!
With these colder night’s, people just want to stay warm, that
is understandable. I have seen too many report’s of house’s
burning down, or apartment complexes burning down, just because
someone decided to use a space heater on an extension cord. Any
time that you use anything electric for heat, you will be using
a lot of current. Extension cord’s are not meant to pull that
much juice, they will over heat, and unlike your space heater,
there are no sensor’s on the extension cord to tell it when it
is too hot and need’s to shut off. So when your extension cord
gets too hot, it will begin to melt, when it gets to that
point, nothing good happens. Make sure if you use space heater’s
that you plug them directly into the wall. Even being directly
into the wall, some older house’s could have worn out wiring,
so they can still get too hot and cause problem’s. I suggest
that if you are going to use anything that draw’s a lot of juice
to use a Twin-Star TSR-01 Safer Socket Fire Prevention Plug , They are Easy to install – no wiring
necessary, simply plug into your existing wall outlet and you’re
done! LED status lights – green indicates safe temperature, red
indicates overheat and shutoff. Easy reset – when outlet cools,
simply unplug and re-plug into your wall outlet.
Another big thing that too many people fail to realize, is that
you are supposed to keep usually 3 feet in front, back, and side
to side clear or anything around the space heater. There are
warning sign’s attached to the plug in and on the back of the
unit where the wire run’s into the inside of the space heater,
that tell you what you shouldn’t do. Also, never place anything
on top of the space heater. When I would use a space heater,
before I moved to a place with Central heat and Air, I would use
the Infrared heater’s, those seemed to work the best. Although,
the one that I had the best luck with, I can no longer find.
I’m sure they just changed the design of it, but I had it for
4 year’s, and it never struggled to heat as much as it did when
I bought it brand new.
If you take the time to prepare your family for a fire evacuation
then that will help your Family survive. I would strongly
suggest that you write out an evacuation plan, one for every
kind of emergency that you can think of. The most common
emergency this time of year, is fire. So I would definitely talk
with your family about the evacuation procedure’s. If you have
small children, that can be quite a task. But if you explain
to everyone what to do, then refresh them once or twice a month
while also doing some fire drill’s, then that will help them
realize what to do in the event of a fire. Repetition will
help it get stuck into memory. I will explain more on this in
my next blog post, as well as give you some example’s of what
you can do. But in the end, every family is different, so that
is what you would have to determine, Find the one that work’s
best for you and you’re family and stick to it. It can save lives.
Stay warm this winter, not crispy!