Come On Baby. Light My Fire.

On August 1, 2013, we will celebrate our 40th year of being in business. Our business is located in Polk County.  In those 40 years, we have never ever met up with the county’s fire inspector.

Enter.  Chad.  The Polk County Fire Inspector.

He told me that he was hired 5 years ago and it has taken him that long to circulate through all of the businesses in Polk county that had never had a fire inspection.  He was actually quite pleased with how well we had maintained a safe environment without him.

We had just a few things to fix for him and we would be in business.  First up, we had a few batteries that were no longer re-charging in our emergency lighting.  Easy fix once we ordered the batteries online.  Nope.  No AA batteries in these bad boys.  They cost $15 per battery!

Next item up for fixing was switching out lightbulbs in our Exit signs.  We have about 10 lit exits signs throughout the building, but one of them needed new light bulbs.

We also had to call Capital Fire Equipment to make sure all of our fire extinguishers were in good working order.  

They came out the next day and inspected all of our extinguishers.  Tyler is the name of the young man who took good care of us.  He used to work for us when he was a teenager, so it was fun to see him all grown up as an adult.

We also have to make sure that our ansul system in the kitchen was primed and ready to extinguish any grease fires.

The ansul system is located in the kitchen around the fryer and stove top.  It is designed, so that if you have a grease fire, you can pull a trigger and the fire retardant will fall from these valves in our hood.

The last thing that we had to adjust, so that it was according to code was our doors.  Our doors had turn key locks.  Our inspector had us put in keyed lock entries.  We put a call in to Strauss and Lock and they got us in good working order.

For about $500, we had ourselves in good working order and fully approved by our fire inspector.  What a good feeling to know that we are safe.  Having had a fire in my house about five years ago, I understand the importance of keeping things up to code!

Put out any fires yourself?  Have you ever set off the fire alarms while you were cooking?  Yeah.  Me neither.