Quick question - In an enclosed space without any incoming air, say, fifty feet square, how long would a fire be able to burn before it consumed all the air?
https://www.picotech.com/library/results/burning-oxygen That link says a candle will burn under a cup for thirty seconds. Convert 50x50xceiling height into cubic meters. Find out how many cubic meters are in an eight ounce glass (article doesn’t say how big the cup or how thick the wick was) Divide the size of the room by the size of the cup. Multiply the size of the candle by the answer for a thirty second burn. Larger fires will burn out faster. Smaller, slower.
Not sure how long it takes, but there was a rock star who told about he and his band almost suffocated themselves in his very well soundproofed home studio. The studio was in the house, and he had small children, so he'd gone to great expense to make sure working at home in his new studio wouldn't bother sleeping babies, and vice versa. They'd decided it would be cool to record by candle light, so they filled the studio with candles...Lots of them. Apparently it didn't take long before he and the band members were all crabby and sleepy as hell. He's an intelligent guy, thank God, so he realized they were slowly suffocating. That was the last of the candles in the studio. Some of his fans can be a bit trollish when they do keyword searches for the band, so I won't mention them here. I'll be glad to PM it, though, if you want to try to find the interview where he talked about this. Hilariously weird stuff used to happen to these guys all the time, so I have no reason to believe he made it up. He's a household name who wouldn't have to do that to get attention.
How big a fire? If it's any sort of decent size you're looking at dying from smoke inhalation or the effects of heat before the fire uses up all the oxygen, particularly as a lack of oxygen will lead to sub-optimal combustion and the release of huge quantities of smoke. If it's just the duration of the fire you're worried about then, like I say, how big a fire? How long's a piece of string?
If you can understand the math, this may help. https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/23007/how-much-oxygen-would-be-consumed-on-a-1-cm-squared-surface-which-is-on-fire (I how ever am not so good at such things.)
They were absolutely not suffocating; they were feeling CO poisoning. You need less oxygen density than a candle, it’s go out before you’d suffocate, but you can withstand very little carbon monoxide, which fire makes copious amounts of.
Thanks for that info! Had the singer not figured out the candles were the culprit and opened the doors and brought in a fan, what would have happened? Would they have just gone to sleep, or started throwing up, or what? His next home studio was on an exterior wall with openable windows, and I always wondered if, aside from a more pleasant view, the candle scare had anything to do with that.
Would have gone to sleep and a few minutes later die. That’s what kills people who commit suicide by turning running their car in the garage.
Okay, followup question: In a Carbon Monoxide Poisoning situation, how would that be influenced if, say, two characters were also engaging in a violent, action-heavy swordfight? Would adrenaline and lots of breathing let them stay concious for longer (breathing in more poison) or would the CO knock them out regardless?
It’d knock them out faster. CO poisoning prevents oxygen from getting to the brain by binding to the hemoglobin in your blood, so no amount of adrenaline will overcome that. The faster you use the oxygen you have, the faster you go out.
Well, technically it's only very, very, very flammable but most people are unable to tell a deflagration from a genuine explosion and the end result is very similar if you happen to be in the way of either.
I was asserting that carbon monoxide was largely inert, but I was wrong. The triple gong in the middle of it is unbalanced and I didn’t realize that. It would require a large concentration however, each molecule has a lot of energy in it, but it also takes a lot of energy to break.
Yeah, it tends only to ignite in pre-existing fire conditions. I've never heard of it igniting due to a stray spark in the same way as say methane or propane. Most people don't know that smoke can blow up. I only know because it's my job to know, seeing as I go swimming about in the stuff.
CO combusting happens all the time in large fires. It's called "flashover." People mix it up with a backdraft but it's different. Lots of buildings will experience flashover once they get hot enough. All the smoke and everything combustible, including the CO, ignites together. About 1:40 is when it starts to get good. At 2:45 in this video, you can get a good look at CO burning.
You can also get the fun and games that is a remote smoke explosion, when smoke in a different compartment from the fire is heated to the point that it suddenly ignites. Two guys were killed in a place called Blaina in Wales when a fire in the kitchen broke through the the ceiling and the floor of the room above, igniting the smoke that had been building up in there and absorbing the heat from the fire below. The ball of fire and accompanying pressure wave rolled down the stairs, hit the guys and slammed the front door shut behind them, jamming it on a length of hose. They couldn't get out and the guys outside couldn't get in quickly enough to do any good- though, honestly, they were done for either way; you just don't survive that kind of thing, not in 1990s fire gear. Even the stuff we have now only buys you a second or two, tops, in those conditions.
way back in the day they used to use CO as a gas for ovens etc - thats where the committing suicide by putting your head in the oven thing comes from. Coal gas which was used widely in the 50s and 60s before gas drilling became a thing was principally CO - it burnt with a blue flame converting to CO2
Ah. That explains a lot. That's why they got sleepy so quickly then. They were playing high energy rock and roll with backup vocals, so everyone was singing while playing.
