Fucking brilliant. It's meant to put out a fire. You grab it by the handle and toss it at the fire. But it contains too little liquid. Anyway, they switched to using Carbon Tetrachloride which is good at smothering flames, except if it is heated to 200 C at which point it turns into phosgene which is a chemical weapon. Brilliant. This was great.
"Funny" regulatory story on those. They are not legal in the US since the regulators decided they were fire extinguishers and then compared them to the rules for fire extinguishers. They noted the lack of a nozzle, gauge, and locking device and proclaimed them out of compliance. They also noted that there are fires the balls do not put out, which to be fair, is kind of true for everything except the heat death of the universe.
It's a shame. It would probably be a good thing to keep over a domestic laser cutter or 3d printer.
"Funny" story along the same lines from an alumina refinery I worked at.
Part of alumina requires use of a lot of extremely corrosive sodium hydroxide liquid, which eats through aluminium like the acid blood from Aliens. A neutralizing agent was developed that could be quickly applied to burns from the liquid, delivered via a pressurised can that workers would keep on their person at all times.
The material the pressurised can was made of? Aluminium, of course.
The sight of the safety superintendent swaggering around a chemical refinery with essentially a grenade attached to his belt for a couple of weeks before they realised the danger, was my first real eye-opener to how people can be promoted FAR past their level of competence.
"Legal" or not, they're still readily available from the usual sources and I do keep one near the more-experimental of the 3D printers.
For those who aren't familiar, they're more-or-less a firework: Cardboard shell with redundant fuses wrapped around it to activate a charge inside, and with fire-putter-outer powder (IIRC sodium bicarb, but maybe something else) instead of stars. This whole thing is then wrapped in thin plastic.
Operation is simple: Fuse lights, because fire. It burns fast, by design. It explodes. The area is covered in powder.
It might even work. (Might make things worse, too, but things are already awful by this point.)
Your comment encouraged me to look. It appears I my memory was wrong. I shall thus write about that.
I, a dumb consumer, conflated my singular experience with actually-using a fire extinguisher (which was full of sodium bicarb, and this was important to determine immediately after use because food was involved nearby, on a holiday, with lots of people to feed) to actually-extinguish a fire one time many years ago with the contents of the AFO fireball "percussive fire alert" widget that I have in the printing room.
(FWIW: That actually-used fire extinguisher was from Kidde, and I trust its CAS-numbered labelling.)
The AFO fireball widget here doesn't really say what it has inside: The printing on the plastic wrapper just says that it is "filled up with harmless Environmental powder(91/155EEC)" [sic] which does not seem to mean anything by itself.
Thanks, Elbonia.
All barely-reliable references I can find (and all of which are vague) for the AFO device's actual contents point to monoammonium phosphate, which I discovered even while not using that compound as a search time.
And that's not so good for electronics.
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But realistically, in the event of a fire that would actually set this thing off: The electronics are mostly toast anyway. Some may survive, some may not. Some may seem to survive but fail soon after, like the lifespan got shortened.
I've spent some time doing fire cleanup and restoration work. I've tried to rescue a fair number of electronic things that were on their way to the dumpster. It was mostly disappointment, interspersed with only occasional moments of seemingly-brief joy.
And that was actually a thing I considered of when I put this next to my printer a few years ago: I reasoned at that time that this will probably only activate if the bench (or room) is properly-aflame, but that it might help reduce total losses if it does activate.
The best case is that the printers (and other electronics) will get covered, nearly-enough, by the replacement-value rider on the insurance of my home's contents. They're all getting dumpstered and replaced with a check that should be in the right ballpark, and I can buy/built them again.
I also reasoned that the explosive fireball might buy a enough time to ultimately save the house that I'm in, so that added to its positivity. And that it might alert me if my usual smoke alarms did not: If I were sleeping or something, then a fucking explosion might wake me up in ways that loud high-frequency beeping might not.
But mostly, I reasoned that it might help save the cat from a printer fire, and that big dumb expensive cat is very important to me for all kinds of reasons.
So I still keep the firebomb near the experimental printer.
And like I said: Maybe it helps, and maybe it makes it worse. (I can't predict that without testing, but testing was is beyond my means. There's plenty of video of these things behaving well, and also of them behaving badly, but I'm not aware of anyone testing such a device with specifically a thing like a printer fire on a cluttered bench. I can imagine quite a lot, but that's not testing.)
yeah, map is good stuff, but not great for electronics
i am not an expert but i think the concern with map on electronics is not so much that the phosphoric acid will eat them (if they're hot enough to unleash the ammonia, as you said, they're toast) but more that it will dissolve in the water from the firehose to form a fairly acidic solution that may still corrode the electronics
I'm neither a lawyer nor familiar with US law/regulatory stuff or US consumer - but I assume the point is that it's not legal to sell it as a fire extinguisher, nor to use it to satisfy fire extinguishing equipment requirements for your office building or whatever. Not that you're breaking the law if you have in your home, whatever you want to use it for (unless you're required to have a fire extinguisher, in which case you'd just have it in addition, if I'm correct).
That's a pretty cool product IMO. Even more interesting than throwing it into a fire is how it can be mounted above stoves, junction boxes, or inside a car's engine compartment to put out fires where they start.
As a bonus feature, any unreacted carbon tetrachloride is still horrendous even without phosgene conversion. Truly an excellent product, modern stuff just isn't made anywhere near as well.
