Two ways to prevent electrical fires from occurring in your home
An electrical fire can endanger you and your family and could cause irreparable damage to your home. As such, it's important to take steps to prevent this type of fire from breaking out. Here are two ways to do this.
Avoid overloading plug sockets
Most households nowadays have dozens of different electrical appliances and gadgets. As a result of this, it's quite common for people to have a large number of devices plugged in at once.
If you don't have a lot of plug sockets in your home, you may find yourself using multi-socket extension leads, so that you can plug more than one or two devices into a single socket.
Whilst using these leads occasionally for short periods of time is perfectly safe, it can be extremely dangerous to use them on a regular basis.
The reason for this is that using a single plug socket to deliver electricity to multiple devices can result in that socket being overloaded. An overloaded socket can heat up very quickly; when this happens, the plastic cabling that encases the socket's electrical wires can melt, leaving these hot wires exposed. In this situation, a single, momentary spark could be enough to ignite a fire behind the wall where the wires are located.
As such, it is important to avoid using extension leads too frequently. If you're frustrated by the fact that you don't have enough sockets to plug in all of your devices, it might be worth hiring an electrician to install additional plug sockets around your home.
Check your electrical appliances for defects on a regular basis
Faulty electrical appliances could potentially cause a fire to break out in your home. As such, it's important to check the electrical goods around your house for signs of defects on a regular basis.
Should you notice a defect, you should ask an electrician who performs electrical appliance repair work to fix the item as soon as possible. You should try to avoid using this item until these repairs have been carried out. If you absolutely must use the defective appliance, you should remain in the room whilst it is plugged in and keep a fire extinguisher nearby, just in case an electrical fire breaks out.
Some of the main things you should look out for when checking an electrical appliance for defects are frayed wiring, and scorch marks around the metal pins of its plug. Additionally, a faulty appliance may also produce a buzzing noise or emit a burning odour when it is plugged in.