One thing I always have hooked up to my CO2 tank is a long coil hose and spray nozzle at the end. If the dash decides to light ill hit it with that instead of a bunch of white crap everywhere. No mess. Outside fire can get the foam.
Ahh, you might want to try that before you do it for real. I almost set a guy on fire that way once upon a time.............
I came into the main plant, and they had brought a pro welder in to weld the underside of a big water tank that was off the ground.
It was empty, but the concrete floor under it was nasty, so they had put down some big sheets of cardboard for him to lay on.
He had a full hood, and leather protection from the slag, but it was raining down on the cardboard.
The folks standing around kept stamping it out, but a section that was hard to get to started flaring up.
He asked for somebody to pour some water on it. But smug in my brilliance, I had a better idea.
Due to the nature of the company, there were about a dozen 20lb CO2 bottles full of CO2 standing around.
No regulator, just a valve on the top and a threaded fitting on the side of the stem.
No need to get the guy wet, I just reached over, grabbed a bottle, aimed it at the bottom of the fire and cracked the valve.
CO2 gas and bits of dry ice shot out under about 1500lbs of pressure.
Instant blowtorch.
The cardboard flared up and was licking at his shirt in a split second.
He yelled and rolled away. Fortunately one of the other guys was walking up with a bucket of water and put the cardboard out.
I felt like an idiot. I mean, its was CO2, not O2, or propane. Its supposed to put out fires, not make them faster.
Later, when I thought about it of course, I realized what was wrong. Fire extinguishers do not shoot out a thin fast jet of gas. They have that big diffuser nozzle that puts out a large fast moving cloud.
That cloud displaces the air, covers the fire and starves it for oxygen.
What I created was a venturi effect. Sure I was shooting out CO2, but as a fast thin jet, it was sucking 10 times the amount of air with it. Just like old timey bug sprayer sucks the liquid out of the can when the air shoots over the dip tube, or how you can empty a big container of water by shooting a fast moving stream of water across the top.
The part of the fire the gas hit was probably snuffed right out, but the wide hurricane that it brought with it fanned the rest of the blaze.
If you want to use the hose on an inside fire, you need to put some kind of nozzle on it that will spread it out and slow down the stream.
