The Cambridge Evening News has reported, with the headline above that paramedics treated a man who had inhaled dangerous fumes from a fridge-freezer.
Emergency services were called to a property in Saffron Walden on Friday after the man heard a hissing noise. Fire crews removed the fridge-freezer from the kitchen, then aired the property.
This strikes me, a trained refrigeration engineer, as a bit of an odd story really and possibly the actual problem hasn’t been resolved.
Station officer Paul Curtis, in charge of the incident, said: “It appears that the leak may have been going on for a few days. The man told us that he’d been suffering from a sore throat, streaming eyes and a tight chest for a few days but always felt better when he went outside into the fresh air.
“He went into the kitchen and heard a hissing noise and there was a funny smell and that’s when we were called.
This would seem to be almost impossible to happen with a domestic refrigerator of almost any design as, quite simple, there isn’t enough gas in the machine to cause this and, even if there were, it is non-toxic.
In most modern iso-butane based fridges there is well short of 50 grams of gas. Even in a very small kitchen the concentration of gas in the air would be of an extremely low level.
The two older forms of gas (R134a & R12a) would not cause these symptoms.
Station officer Curtis goes on to sat that, “Domestic appliances are a common cause of incidents we attend and I would recommend as good practice that people get all electrical appliances checked out by an expert on a routine basis.”
This is true of most fire services but, in most instances it is due to ignition, most often from cooking.