. :fixed:Mobius wrote:65 degrees is a fatal temperature. Where the hell do you live? In the middle of the Sahara?
nope, it's a chemical reaction. The cans could of been inside a house and they'd still of ignited.roid wrote:i'd say there was some ignition source nearby. They didn't auto-ignite at only 18C, that's for sure.
hmm, but what chemical reaction specifically? I mean, do they ever ignite when the can lid is on? That's what i'm curious about. It requries something in air? Is it something in the material of the rags? i'd really like to know what the name of this process is that can heat up these things enough to cause ignition.woodchip wrote:nope, it's a chemical reaction. The cans could of been inside a house and they'd still of ignited.roid wrote:i'd say there was some ignition source nearby. They didn't auto-ignite at only 18C, that's for sure.
Oil Seeds and oil-seed products
Moisture is a critical factor in self-heating of these materials. Typically, storage at 9-14% moisture is commonly satisfactory, but limits are established for each individual variety of oil seed. In the presence of excess moisture, but at levels below the required amount for germinating the seed, the activity of mold fungi is a likely candidate. This has been established for flax and sunflower seeds, as well as soy beans. Many of the oil seeds generate oils that are self-heating. Palm kernels, rape seed and cotton seed have also been studied
grammar nazi time.woodchip wrote:nope, it's a chemical reaction. The cans could of been inside a house and they'd still of ignited.
That gets to me too. Mostly because if people were actually thinking about the words they were writing instead of just writing them automatically, it would be very clear how little sense it makes.dissent wrote: grammar nazi time.
I see this more and more it seems (I'm not just pickin' on you, woody; it just that you have a twofer here). "could of" is supposed to be "could've", a contraction of "could have". See here. Similarly, "they'd still of" should be "they'd still have", contracting from "they would still have", which could equally have been written "they still would've", but not "they still would of"...
No, one of them started first, by itself, the one on the left that's burned the most. Kind of surprised me too. I'd never actually seen spontaneous combustion occur. The other 2 were sitting right next to the first one, so maybe those caught fire from the heat or some flying embers from the one already burning. They were burning for at least a half an hour before I saw what was going on. Plus, the cans were sitting in the sun, so that may have helped things fire up too.roid wrote:i'd say there was some ignition source nearby. They didn't auto-ignite at only 18C, that's for sure.
(On that note, last night out my window I saw a huge-ass shooting star burn down through the sky, i literally stood up and waited for the impact blast wave (but nope). Fires can come from weird places)
Unless there was some kinda freak-reflection going on with the shiny containers and sunlight, and it heated up to the self-ignition temp that way. I've heard of bush fires starting on their own from bottles or aluminium cans in this manner.
I have a paper bag of ashes from the wood burner sitting in the house for well over a year. No flames yettunnelcat wrote:No, one of them started first, by itself, the one on the left that's burned the most. Kind of surprised me too. I'd never actually seen spontaneous combustion occur. The other 2 were sitting right next to the first one, so maybe those caught fire from the heat or some flying embers from the one already burning. They were burning for at least a half an hour before I saw what was going on. Plus, the cans were sitting in the sun, so that may have helped things fire up too.roid wrote:i'd say there was some ignition source nearby. They didn't auto-ignite at only 18C, that's for sure.
(On that note, last night out my window I saw a huge-ass shooting star burn down through the sky, i literally stood up and waited for the impact blast wave (but nope). Fires can come from weird places)
Unless there was some kinda freak-reflection going on with the shiny containers and sunlight, and it heated up to the self-ignition temp that way. I've heard of bush fires starting on their own from bottles or aluminium cans in this manner.
They do have warnings on the cans to soak all used rags in water before disposing of in the trash. I guess it's a good warning to heed.
In another instance of unintended fire rekindling, I had a small wood stove that was used to heat the house in winter. When the fire had burned out overnight, I used to put the ashes in a metal bucket every morning and store them on the brick heat shield the stove was sitting on, to make sure they were dead. They would then be put into the trash on trash day, so they accumulated for over a week one time. One night, I walked downstairs in the dark and saw a faint glow. The ash in the can was actually glowing, still burning, even though they had felt cold several nights before. The can was very hot! I had to take it outside and douse it with water.
I've heard of idiots putting ashes in paper bags and storing them on a porch or in a garage to throw out. One apartment actually caught fire in Portland because they assumed the ashes were dead. Set the whole unit and the one next door on fire. Ouch! The lesson kiddies, don't assume the ashes from a fireplace or wood stove are dead the next day or two after the fire goes out.
. I couldn't count the amount of trees we felled and cut up. We welded a log trailer up from plans in Mother Earth News back when it was useful. The neck retracted into itself to amke it abot 10 feet long, but you could extend the tongue and carry 24' long logs with it. Hehe, we'd go right beside I-20 and drop one, then come back about 3-4 days later. I started with a sledge and wood grenade, moved up to maul, then graduated to axe 
. Good memories actually except for the cold mornings . That brings back a few memories. When we lived in Washington, we owned a large wooded lot. The winters were a little windy and invariably a few trees blew down every winter. There was that little wood stove in the living room, so we decided to cut and split our own wood. There was plenty every spring.flip wrote:I don't even wanna discuss wood-burning stoves
Once the rags dried out, I'd assume that the oxidation reaction contributing the heat in the first place would occur at a greatly-reduced rate, if not stop it completely. Even putting aside soaking the rags in water, the very act of spreading them out flat to dry would help alleviate heat build-up.Ferno wrote:that's a good question. It's kind of weird that the warning label says spontaneous combustion in the sentence advising people to soak rags in water, and in the next sentence it says to keep away from sources of ignition after the rags dried.
if it does spontaneously ignite, wouldn't it be a risk even after it's dried out? What has changed? Because as far as I know, there's nothing water soluble in wood staining. it's all solvent/oil based, and that doesn't mix with water.
Yeah Axe is best. Break the circle at the edge and then start chopping wedges out. I've never split maple that I can remember but I'm pretty sure twisted hickory is the worsetunnelcat wrote:That brings back a few memories. When we lived in Washington, we owned a large wooded lot. The winters were a little windy and invariably a few trees blew down every winter. There was that little wood stove in the living room, so we decided to cut and split our own wood. There was plenty every spring.flip wrote:I don't even wanna discuss wood-burning stoves
Well, that led to getting a chainsaw and log peavey, then a sledge and some wedges, then an axe and then a maul. We soon found out we hated Maple and loved Alder, for two simple reasons, knots and hardness. Specifically the lack of knots in Alder and the preponderance of knots in Maple. And Maple is effing hard! Gawd Maple burned nice and long though, but it was a real bear to split by hand.
. You could lose a maul, wood grenade and 2 wedges in one of those things Yeah, this particular house had these dipsh*t electric wall heaters that were absolute junk. They had little squirrel cage fans that invariably rattled and squeaked as they spun. The motor bearings had to be constantly maintained and lubricated, which necessitated removing the entire unit from the wall. The thermostat for each unit directly controlled 110 volts and had a huge hysteresis. You couldn't find a happy medium at all. AND, there were three of the units in the living room and one in each bedroom, all problematic and noisy. Needless to say, our little Jotul wood stove was used all the time in the winter since I got tired of fuddling around with those poor excuses for heat production and we didn't want to retrofit the heating system.Krom wrote:At my previous house we used a wood stove for the primary heating in winter, the furnace was a hot water baseboard setup. The wood stove heat was plain unbeatable, its quiet, and really warms the house to the core and you get to watch it the fire through its window to boot. The baseboard heat is pretty nice too but does make it hard to put furniture along the walls where it is. In-floor heating is really the ideal system, but its hard to build and maintain so its pretty rare.
We burned a lot of oak, which we cut and split ourselves. Oak is pretty nice, it burns for a long time, puts out a lot of heat, and as long as it is dry it burns very cleanly.
At the house I am in now the heat is forced air which I hate, its noisy and takes forever to really warm the house up (even though this is a more efficient house than the previous one).
I can absolutely positively say that one can did for sure light off on it's own. It had been sitting in the sun for several hours though. I think the other two were close enough to the first one to get some heat.Ferno wrote:cans that sit like that with no lid on that do NOT spontaneously ignite. there had to be an ignition source nearby, either external (more likely) or internal (not very likely)
The worst wood to split is elm and willowflip wrote:Yeah Axe is best. Break the circle at the edge and then start chopping wedges out. I've never split maple that I can remember but I'm pretty sure twisted hickory is the worsetunnelcat wrote:That brings back a few memories. When we lived in Washington, we owned a large wooded lot. The winters were a little windy and invariably a few trees blew down every winter. There was that little wood stove in the living room, so we decided to cut and split our own wood. There was plenty every spring.flip wrote:I don't even wanna discuss wood-burning stoves
Well, that led to getting a chainsaw and log peavey, then a sledge and some wedges, then an axe and then a maul. We soon found out we hated Maple and loved Alder, for two simple reasons, knots and hardness. Specifically the lack of knots in Alder and the preponderance of knots in Maple. And Maple is effing hard! Gawd Maple burned nice and long though, but it was a real bear to split by hand.
So what we can take away from this is A) don't leave cans that contained a flammable liquid in the heat and B) don't stuff a shitton of rags in a can that had flammable liquid in it.tunnelcat wrote:I had a lot of rags and paper towels stuffed into that one can pretty tightly, and they were very saturated with sealer. The sun was on the can for at least 2 hours, so I'm betting that on the bottom of the pile, conditions were just right for that perfect stoichiometric concentration, heat and spontaneous ignition. There was also a Styrofoam applicator inside as well. Very flammable.
