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Safety Checklist for Oxygen Safety & Smoking In a Home

Combining cigarettes or any other flame source with medical oxygen in the home is a recipe for disaster. You don't have to look hard to find multiple examples of flash burn injuries and sometimes even death to conclude that allowing the the two to co-exist is literally playing with fire. The safest policy is to not allow smoking in a house where pure oxygen is in use. However, if that's not possible, run through a safety checklist to make sure the danger is minimized.

  1. Warning Signs

    • Signs warning against smoking should be posted prominently immediately upon entering the house and perhaps even outside each door. Human nature being what it is, and memory sometimes quite short, it wouldn't hurt to also post signs in each room of the house. Signs should should be large and colorful enough to draw attention and not in danger of being overlooked. Likewise, any oxygen cylinder in the house should be plainly labeled as such.

    Devices

    • There are two devices that should be present and in working order in any house where oxygen is in use - smoke detectors and fire extinguishers. Smoke detectors should be placed throughout the house and have their batteries checked regularly. This first line of defense should offer a warning against cigarette or any other type of smoke that is accumulating inside. A house where oxygen is being used needs to have at least one fire extinguisher, maybe more, and everyone in the house taught know how to operate them.

    Safe Distance

    • The absolute minimum distance an oxygen user should stay from a smoker is 6 feet, though no one would blame him for wanting to ban smoking from the home completely. Obviously, a greater distance would be better. All parts of the breathing apparatus and system fall within the 6 feet rule. No closer.

    Final Tips

    • Readers should be aware that oxygen itself is not flammable, but is an excellent accelerator, which means if there is an open flame present, oxygen can help it spread rapidly. This is why it's such a bad idea to have any type of open flame around oxygen. Consider that the normal atmosphere we breathe has about 21 percent oxygen, and how fast a flame can spread in that environment. Now bump that oxygen level to the near 100 percent purity in an oxygen cylinder. It doesn't take much imagination to visualize the disaster potential.

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