Smoke curls out from the fuse box at the back of a maintenance room. A staff member pulls a portable fire extinguisher off the wall, removes the safety pin, squeezes the handle, and the unit discharges correctly. The fire stays small and the damage is limited. In that chain of events, every physica...

If you manage a server room, an electrical cabinet, or a laboratory, the short answer is this: CO2 fire extinguishers are designed for Class B flammable liquid fires and fires involving live electrical equipment. They work by displacing oxygen and rapidly cooling the fire, and they leave no residue...

Before you commit to a fire extinguisher purchase, you need to answer one question: what should you not use a CO2 fire extinguisher on? CO2 extinguishers save lives in the right conditions, but they have hard limits. Use one on the wrong fire and you can scatter burning fuel, trigger re-ignition, o...

If you have ever looked at the black-horned extinguisher beside a server rack and asked what does a CO2 fire extinguisher stand for, the answer is straightforward: CO2 stands for carbon dioxide. A CO2 fire extinguisher is a portable device that stores carbon dioxide as a liquid under pressure and r...

Most fire extinguishers tell you their status with a small needle on a pressure gauge. A CO2 fire extinguisher does not. That difference is why learning how to inspect a CO2 fire extinguisher properly is not just a matter of reading a dial—it requires a different set of checks, the most important o...

If you manage a CO2 fire extinguisher, you already know it has no pressure gauge. So how can you tell whether it is still charged? You check the proper weight of the CO2 fire extinguisher. Carbon dioxide is stored as a liquid inside the cylinder, and as long as liquid remains, the internal pressure...