What is flashover?
As the smoky gas layer in a room becomes hotter it radiates more and more heat to the rest of the furniture in the room. Finally, the whole room catches fire. This is flashover. After flashover the room continues to burn and becomes very hot. Flames come out of windows and doors. Fire spread to other rooms becomes likely. The fire is very difficult to control. The temperature of the hot smoky gases at the time of flashover is about 600ºC. This is extremely hot, nearly red hot. But after that the temperature of the room may climb to over 1000ºC. The room will carry on burning until it has consumed all the fuel, or until firefighters put it out. FLASHOVER CAN OCCUR WITHIN 3 MINUTES OF A FIRE STARTING IN A DOMESTIC ROOM How do we detect fires? Since fires grow so fast and become deadly so quickly, it is important that we detect them early. There are a number of different ways to detect a fire. Smoke detectors look for the reduction in visibility caused by sooty gases. Instead, they may be
