When you hear the name Samsung, your first thought likely turns to the innovative electronic products that have made the Korean company a global success. You may also be familiar with the company as a producer of home appliances, where its track record is much less stellar.
But unless you live in South Korea, there's one innovative product that Samsung has designed, developed, and produced that you probably would never associate with the company: fire extinguishers. What makes Samsung's product offering in this category of consumer household goods remarkable is that the company's designers have done some amazing out of the box thinking to create a product unlike anything else on the market: the Firevase.
The team Samsung commissioned to develop the product really did their homework to identify why the more traditional fire extinguisher we all know wasn't being more widely adopted and used successfully to put out fires in South Korea. The following short video starts with highlighting the pain points for storing these established fire extinguishers that will be immediately familiar to anyone who has one:
As you can see in the video, the main problem with the traditional fire extinguisher is its design. They were designed and developed for use in industrial settings, which are far different from residential settings. Because that's the case, there are no good, convenient places to store a traditional fire extinguisher in a home. Instead, they often get stashed away, out of sight. That puts barriers in the way of their being used, and worse, shrinks the amount of time a fire extinguisher can be used most effectively: immediately after a fire has started.
Samsung's approach in developing the Firevase directly addresses that issue. Instead of something that gets crammed into a kitchen cabinet, their concept fits out in the open. More importantly, because it is stored out in the open where it is easily accessible, homeowners can respond to fires while they are still able to be most easily contained.
To the best of our knowledge, the Firevase as conceived by Samsung's design team is not available outside of South Korea. The company appears to have only made a limited run of the product, mainly as part of a general awareness campaign. We're writing about it today because we came across it while researching another fire extinguisher concept whose designer identified the same problems for residential users the Firevase's design team did. That product will be featured in Part II!...
Update: One of our readers paid close attention to Samsung's promotional video and what they saw raises a good question about how capable the Firevase might be at putting out fires:
Seems like Samsung might have a good idea - if only they had shown the extinguisher actually extinguishing a fire. The 3 examples that they show at 2:22 to 2:25, do not show the fire going out. They prematurely stopped the video from showing that for all three.
That may be exactly why the Firevase never made to the marketplace. There are however other products similar to it in concept that have, but which raise similar questions about their fire-fighting capabilities. For more about some of those products, check out TylerTube's video putting them to the test!