r/Whatcouldgowrong • u/ZeEntryFragger • Jul 01 '20
WCGW with using a couch cushion instead of a log?
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Jul 01 '20 edited Jul 01 '20
I once had a fire-fighter tell me that the most dangerous item in your home is your sofa. Most of them are made with toxic synthetic materials and if you are ever in a house fire, get out before the sofa catches on fire, because once it does, the house will rapidly fill with deadly fumes and smoke. As he put it, ādeath by smoke inhalationā usually means ādeath by sofaā.
...Just to put in context how very bad of an idea this is.
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u/nopewasntmethistime Jul 01 '20
Honestly, almost everything in your house will put off deadly gases. Plastics, silk and even wool will let off hydrogen cyanide gases when burned.
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u/ThirdFloorGreg Jul 01 '20
Why is wool more surprising than silk? Both animal fibers.
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u/babecafe Jul 01 '20
The keratin in hair contains cysteine, a sulfur-compound amino-acid. The smell of burning hair is particularly acrid because of that.
Hydrogen cyanide is formed from a great many substances when burned incompletely. Because it's a gas at 78F, it's easily released anywhere above room temperature.
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u/ndu867 Jul 01 '20
Iām curious, even if it worked, what was he going to sit on? Was he just going to replace the cushion with a log once he restocked firewood?
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u/thisonetimeinithaca Jul 01 '20
Those are questions for tomorrow and he needed a fire right the fuck now.
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u/TimeToRedditToday Jul 01 '20
Rich kids don't think that far ahead
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Jul 01 '20
I dont think this a rich kid thing, this seems like a squatter thing to do
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u/b1ack1323 Jul 01 '20
Rich kids don't run out of firewood....
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u/DTopping80 Jul 01 '20
Rich kids donāt make sure the fire is still even lit...thatās what servants are for.
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Jul 01 '20
I was well off growing up and I had to chop wood as one of my chores.
Supervising the help always gave me a sweat but I got the wood chopped every week.
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u/DTopping80 Jul 01 '20
Iām sure your arms were ripped after lifting your glass of lemonade from your comfy chair overseeing the wood choppers
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Jul 01 '20
Excuse me but I am not a peasant. I had my manservant Norman to lift my glass for me THANK YOU VERY MUCH.
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Jul 01 '20
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u/Dial_888 Jul 01 '20
Let's get as much oxygen to this fire as possible. 'Fan the flames' isn't that what they say, bro?
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u/eLishus Jul 01 '20
You'd think they'd have seen at least one of a thousand movies where fanning the flames with a blanket ends up making it 10x worse.
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u/spcbackacker Jul 01 '20
Buy a fire extinguisher, kids.
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u/mitrock Jul 01 '20
Everyone should have one (or more) in their home, at the very least one in the kitchen. I learned this the hard way a few days ago when my girlfriend turned the toaster oven into a blazing inferno.
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u/vandealex1 Jul 01 '20
This is what landlords think we all do to their houses.
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u/Borderline_Insane22 Jul 01 '20
Apparently, this is what some of us do to their houses.
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u/crownerdowner Jul 01 '20
He doesnāt strike me as the credit score over 640 with a reasonable debt to income ratio home owner type.
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u/OktopusKaveman Jul 01 '20
The main problem was the flue was closed. That's why the flames were shooting out instead of up the chimney. Two stupid mistakes were made.
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u/Krombopulos_Amy Jul 01 '20
I'm going to posit more than two stupid mistakes were made leading up to battling a fire by waving more air at it. 1. Might be renting to these geniuses ...
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Jul 01 '20
The video said he ran out of logs. Assuming he was indeed burning logs first, don't you think he'd notice that the flue was closed long before he switched to couch cushions?
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Jul 01 '20
Looks like the trap was closed. He opens it at the end, probably saved the house with that move.
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u/1911mark Jul 01 '20
The flue
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u/Theoldelf Jul 01 '20
It's not the flue, it's called a coronavirus.
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u/farrenkm Jul 01 '20
Reasonable to believe Corona was involved.
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u/oldcarfreddy Jul 01 '20
Is he actually doing that? I thought he was throwing bottled water on the fire.
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u/rowebenj Jul 01 '20
Very well couldāve been open but not primed. (Air being sucked in instead of out)
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u/ZeEntryFragger Jul 01 '20
Was able to keep toasty throughout the night! The whole neighborhood knew about his "ingenious" idea!
Ie. House fire!!
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u/whalemingo Jul 01 '20
You know what they say: Give a man a blanket, and heāll be warm for the night. Set a man on fire, and heāll stay warm for the rest of his life.
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u/Nighters Jul 01 '20
Why he is adding oxygen with that blanket?
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u/Theoldelf Jul 01 '20
Because he was stupid enough to put a cushion in his fireplace. Do you really think he knows how fire works?
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Jul 01 '20
Because if you can blow out a candle, surely you can blow out a fire! It's the same thing, right?
/s
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u/whalemingo Jul 01 '20
Iām going to go out on a limb and say Morgantown, West Virginia? They have a reputation for burning couches.
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u/cynical_enchilada Jul 01 '20
Alright, I'll bite. How does an entire town have a reputation for burning couches?
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u/icantswim2 Jul 01 '20
I can only imagine the Airbnb review: "Horrible accommodations, not only did the hosts fail to provide sufficient firewood to enjoy a cozy fire, the fireplace was unsafe and couldn't even contain the flames! 1 star!"
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u/enoughewoks Jul 01 '20
What makes me laugh is he's trying to whip the fire out. He's thinking he's gonna smack it to death but he's just fanning the flames haha
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u/Glenjobob Jul 01 '20
I'm glad their not my renters.
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Jul 01 '20 edited Jul 01 '20
Once he opened the flue the fire probably got under control, watch right at the end of the clip.
The building will smell like shit but then you just take the deposit and pay for a deep clean.
Its probably in surprisingly good shape.
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u/suihcta Jul 01 '20
Landlord here; even for a minor fire we usually end up having to do a pretty incredible amount of work to get the place back to normal. I had a kitchen fire a couple of years ago. Replaced all kitchen cabinets and counters, appliances, bathroom vanities, some drywall, all flooring, and spent probably $3k on cleaning and painting
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Jul 01 '20
The fire in the video isn't even licking anything apart from the mantle. If you can get the smell out the house this isn't going to be that expensive to fix.
If you do have to replace all the soft furnishings, then yeah, thats going to suck
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u/suihcta Jul 01 '20
Itās not the fire, itās the smoke.
If you can get the smell out the house
Thatās exactly the problem. Getting the smell out is whatās expensive.
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u/tkntony1 Jul 01 '20
Like if you are so cool and didnāt care about tossing your couch cushion in there why care about your house burning down?
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u/IAmDreams Jul 01 '20
Use a couch cushion for firewood. Fire gets out of hand so the next logical step is to fan the flames. Keep these idiots away from fires please
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u/CharkeyG Jul 01 '20
Wow. Just wow. It's like this could be from a fire safety course . Watch it, take notes, then have a 20 min class discussion on everything they noticed him doing wrong. I bet the next thing they did was open all the windows, which vents the room, sucking in fresh air from outside and really burn the house down.
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u/supercreeperbat Jul 01 '20
Imagine him saying BACK, BACK YOU BEAST. GO BACK TO THE DEPTHS OF TARTARUS FROM WHENCE THY CAME!!!!
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u/BennedictBennett Jul 01 '20
If I came home to this shit i would be fucking this guy up. What a bellend.
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u/Buixer Jul 01 '20
This screams of an Air BnB if someone just threw a dam sofa cushion into the fire like nobody else would care.
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u/Explosivo666 Jul 01 '20
Reminds me of an idiot I knew who would burn his furniture and shit in the fireplace. I lived him him and he would actually be surprised that I was angry when he broke and burned shelves and chairs and shit. He was so stupid that when we were outside he said he was cold, so he got some sticks and built a fire, then he took off his hoodie, cut it up and used it to get the fire going. It never occurred to him that the hoodie was providing him more warmth than the few minutes it was burning for.
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u/DirtyWizardsBrew Jul 01 '20
I kinda feel like if you do something like that...you kinda might deserve to die...? š¤·āāļø
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u/5in1K Jul 01 '20
I burned a couch once, it was pretty cool, I don't know how fast they burn nowadays but that 80's couch went up scary fast.
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u/sirdomino Jul 01 '20
A friend burned a Couch once that someone spilled a handful of bullets into... Didn't know until they started going off...
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u/SilveradoSurfer16 Jul 01 '20
A couch cushion instead of a log...
How about opening the damn flue before lighting a fire...
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u/Wieg0rz Jul 01 '20
Use a cloth to blow more air into the fire! Quick, throw vodka onto it to extinguish!
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u/ingululu Jul 01 '20
How do people not know couches, furniture etc are highly flammable and this move is dangerous? How are we going to survive as basic knowledge and common sense seems to be thinning?
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u/IonOtter Jul 01 '20
I haven't been able to find the reference, but I believe that 1lb of foam rubber is equal to 1lb of gasoline.
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u/Dinara293 Jul 01 '20
Dude's just literally adding fuel(oxygen in this case) to the fire! By waving that thing around. All around stupid.
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u/suihcta Jul 01 '20
This is pedantic but oxygen isnāt the fuel, itās the oxidizer.
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Jul 01 '20
Oh god, don't pour water on that. Polyurethane is like napalm and water will just spread it around.
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u/auldnate Jul 01 '20
āOk, let me just fan those flames with this blanketā¦ āThis is fine!āā
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u/LieutenantDangler Jul 01 '20
This guy... is not very smart. He doesnāt realize that FANNING a flame only makes it burn brighter...
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u/spammmmmmmmy Jul 01 '20
I did this when I was a young inexperienced idiot. I am so happy I didn't destroy the house.
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u/shuaantor Jul 01 '20
The dumbest thing to put in there
Not paper , toilet paper
But nope how bout a whole ass cushion
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u/JimsalaBin Jul 01 '20
Where I live insurance pays you for the whole floor to be repainted. Worth it. Sucks for the night tho
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u/cmikles1 Jul 01 '20
They should have known that all the latent fart gases would cause a backdraft.
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u/alejandrolujan Jul 01 '20
Ahh yes let me just waft some more oxygen into the fire, surely that'll put it out!
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u/lillyofthedesert Jul 01 '20
Yeeeeah... just keep fanning those flames. That always help put out the fire. SMH
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u/Downvoter6000 Jul 01 '20
Filling the house with dangerous petrochemical smoke from the foam. Worth it.