[Fot] Fire Bottle Refill - the verdict

[Robert Lang]

 Hi,
As an aside - the dry chemical home units with the plastic tops mostly use non-ferrous metal for the vessel. You can depressurize the extinguisher and then unscrew the operating valve and empty the dry chemical into a bag (do this outside, it is MESSY). You can then toss the empty metal cylinder into your non-ferrous metal recycling pile for when the price of scrap goes up. ;-)
When I sold my house a few years back, I had 6 or more extinguishers that were 10+ years old and the gauges said "empty". Turns out that means "no pressure" so they would have been useless had they been needed for a real fire.
c ya,Bob Lang

    On Tuesday, March 19, 2019, 4:53:08 PM EDT, Scott Janzen via Fot <fot at autox.team.net> wrote:  
 
 I ended up taking my Halon bottle to a local place that services fire extinguishers, including Halon.  Old school guy, looked at the bottle, hefted it, listened to the liquid sloshing around and said “this is fine”.  He went on to say that if there was a leak the halon would have been gone a long time ago, that these gauges are almost always accurate, and that servicing would cost a few hundred bucks, mainly because in the process he would lose a 1/4 to a 1/2 lb of Halon that he would have to refill.  So, it went back in the car.
I also learned that if you have those ABC fire extinguishers around the house or in your shop, if they have a metal top and valve, they can be serviced, but the ones with the black plastic valve assemblies are disposable.  At ten years old or more, it’s time to replace all of mine.  He said the thing to do before disposing is tap the valve - some of the fire suppressant material will end up in the valve seat and allow the pressure to bleed out, and that way I’m not tossing a pressurized container in the trash that will end up exploding in the trash truck compactor.
Scott

On Mar 9, 2019, at 5:42 PM, John Frymark MacBook <jfrymark at aol.com> wrote:
Scott,
I sent a Fire Bottle in 2013 to a company in Ft Myers, FL to recharge a “short” 5 lb canister that is no longer offered by the company. I liked the placement of that unit in my car and didn’t want to have to reconfigure for a different size. They had me ship to them as “hazardous materials” via UPS and shipped back the same way. Not much over $200 total. Interestingly, they said my 1996 era bottle was still almost fully charged when they checked and refilled. I weigh my bottle every year to make certain there hasn’t been a change in the weight/charge.
Here is the web site: www.firebottleracing.com. I suspect not many are certified to deal with Halon refilling.
John Frymark
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