Nick Todd
Last January, I had a small fire in my shop. I had just brought a finished piece into the house and I decide to send an email. After a few minutes, I smelled smoke and returned to the shop to investigate. I opened the door to see smoke down to the five foot level throughout my shop. At that time I didn’t have smoke detectors in the shop. I kept two fire extinguishers at either end of my shop. The handle on the fire extinguisher failed(it was commercial grade). The other fire extinguisher was behind the fire. I was regulated to the garden hose. The fire was start by a heat gun that either shorted out or I kick on the heat gun on. In the latter case, I am assuming it did not hear the heat gun because of fan noise from a space heater.

In my outlook calendar I have a January reminder to inspect & replace fire extinguishers & smoke detector battery’s in my house & shop.

Lessons learned:
It took less than 30 minutes & $25 to install two smoke detectors. I had always planned on installing smoke detectors, it just never happened.
If I had inspected my fire extinguishers more often, the damages would have been far less.

My shop is in my attached garage. When I started to buy equipment for my shop, I put in a sub-panel to provide protection to my lathes & compressor. That protection worked. Because I had my shop lights on a separate circuit, the lights stayed on when the outlet breakers were tripped. It would not have been fun to put the fire out in the dark.