An 11th grade student could have found the answer to saving people’s homes when threatened by wildfires and other types of fires that could affect them and their property.
That’s because former New Jersey teen, Arul Mathur, recently moved with his family to San Francisco, California, and came face to face with the possibility of wildfires and their family property becoming a possible fatality. This is when he decided to do something about it, creating what many are calling a brilliant invention.
In order to best deal with wildfire “season,” he created a fire-activated extinguisher, which works in exactly the way the invention is called as a Fire-Activated-Canister-Extinguisher, or F.A.C.E. Basically, it can work as a single device that is able to protect fire-risk areas around someone’s house like in the kitchen or bedroom, or by placing many of them in continuous sections of the house, which can then be used as a “defensive perimeter” around someone’s house or entire property to work as a solution against low to moderate intensity fires.
When talking about his invention, Mathur explains, “Over the past three years, there have been almost 7,500,000 acres of wildfire in California alone, destroying nearly 50,000 structures.”
Explaining his inspiration behind his invention, “I heard about the hundreds of thousands of people who evacuated their hoes every year to flee from wildfires, but I never thought that I could be one those people. Finally, in the summer of 2019, a wildfire threatened to force my family to evacuate our home. At that moment, it become personal. I knew that I needed to something about it.”
F.A.C.E. works through a sensor on the device, which when it heats up to a particular temperature, the glycerin elements inside bursts and releases an eco-friendly fire-retardant spray at least five to six feet in all directions with the help of a sprinkler that’s attached to it.
The device is multiple use, which means it can be re-filled with the fire retardant easily. Meanwhile, the only other thing that people need to do to make it work is at the very beginning, which is to add the air-pressure into the canister, something that can be done manually using the valve located on the top.
The young inventor was hoping to introduce F.A.C.E on Kickstarter, placing a goal of $10,000. But incredibly, he reached his target monetary goal and more in less than a day. While he originally offered $99 for the apparatus, it will be sold retail for $120 once production starts.
Currently, the only other similar alternative for his invention is either a manual extinguisher, or the automatic sprinkler systems that most people see on the ceiling. But with these types of sprinklers, they first need to be installed in the home during early construction of the house, and tend to cost around $1 to $3 per square foot, which also means that the price can be extremely high for many homes, reaching price points in the thousands.
While the invention is already quite impressive, Mathur even shared on his page that he plans to donate all the money he has earned to building his F.A.C.E. units and donating them to areas that are at high fire risk. Although he admits that the device’s ability to spray only up to five to six feet won’t stop big fires from spreading, when placed in certain strategic areas, neighborhoods, or rural communities, they could actually work together in order to stop brush fires from turning into wildfires. At the same time, it could also stop a kitchen or living room fire from becoming a massive house fire as well.
In other words, what it could truly do is to help delay big wild fires from getting out of hand until firefighters arrive with their heavy equipment to actually put the fire out.
If you want to see how F.A.C.E. works, take a look at this video below.
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