Home Improvement Product Reviews

EVERYONE should have a kitchen fire extinguisher. The FX10K is an attractive design and mounts easily. Unlike many extinguishers, the red safety tab is easy to remove when you are panicking and trying to get it off in a hurry. If there’s a fire, you are not going to be looking at a safety tab and trying to figure out how to take it off, you’re just going to be ripping at it to remove it, and this comes off easily. Unless you have small kids who play with things, I would even suggest removing it in advance to break the tabs, and then reinserting it with the tabs already broken. That way you can get it off very easily, yet it still acts to prevent accidental discharges.
Unlike the fire extinguishers you may be familiar with, this is a sodium bicarbonate dry chemical extinguisher, designed specifically for grease and oil fires (although it will still be somewhat effective for regular fires). As most people know, you should never throw water on a grease fire, but instead smother it with sand or baking soda. This extinguisher essentially propels baking soda onto the fire to prevent the chemical reaction between heat, fuel, and oxygen, and put out the fire. Although dry chemical extinguishers like this are becoming less popular than wet chemical extinguishers, this is still a very effective product. I wouldn’t buy one of these for a commercial kitchen, but would for a home.
We had a kitchen fire in our oven, and flames shot up the side of the wall. The fire was contained mostly to the oven at the time, but the Kidde FX10K had it out within about 2 seconds flat. It does discharge the entire canister very quickly (you can only really use this once). It is so effective that you shouldn’t need to use it very long, unless you freak out and miss the fire completely. Another advantage is that, since it’s essentially baking soda, you can just wipe up the chemicals with a wet rag once you’re done, and the extinguisher shouldn’t cause any real damage. You could spray your sofa with this stuff and clean it up fairly easily.
I strongly suggest anyone who doesn’t have an extinguisher in their kitchen designed specifically for class K (kitchen) fires purchase this and keep it in a convenient location. I firmly believe our house would have burned down had we not had it.

I’ve had this extinguisher for about 4 years or so, sitting in my kitchen. I recently moved and the movers wouldn’t pack it, so I put it in my car to transport it myself. One week later as I was driving through Texas in the summer, I saw 2 people trying to stomp out a small grass fire that was getting uncomfortably close to some parked cars. Knowing I had the extinguisher, I pulled over to help. One guy looked at the extinguisher and said, “that’s not going to do anything.” I pulled the safety tab and squirted a few places and out came a white powder that immediately extinguished the flames. There were a few flare ups after the fire was out, but I put those out too. I looked at the gauge afterwords and I have to say, it wasn’t completely empty, but it emptied out more than I would have expected for how much I used it. If it were a kitchen fire, it would have been more than ample. It was easy to aim and the force of the spray didn’t make it difficult to handle. If I can’t get this one refilled, I’ll definitely buy another one. Highly recommended.

I’d love to review this fire extinguisher, but when I received it, the dang thing was empty. No big deal, I’ll return it. OOps… you can’t return this item. Falls under the dangerous stuff category.