Fire safety is an important consideration for everyone, especially RVers, with lots of combustible materials in a small space. There have been lots of stories of RVs that have burned to the ground — usually cheaper trailers with propane fridges, but any RV is at risk.

Especially since RVs typically come with just one mandated fire extinguisher, by the door (which I invert and shake once a month, to prevent the contents settling):

If we’re in our bedroom when a fire starts, that extinguisher may not be overly useful — if we can get to that one by the door, we should probably just get out the door, unless the fire is tiny.

So a basic first step is to get a second fire extinguisher for the bedroom, which we keep in a cabinet above the bed:

But we can do better than that. We have purchased several quick can-style fire suppressors, which not only can put out fires, they produce a foam that we can spray onto ourselves if we have to go through flames to get out:

We have several of them all around the coach, including in a cupboard in the kitchen and under the kitchen sink:

In the bathroom cabinet:

And in several compartments in the basement area:

The coach came with a smoke detector in the cockpit area, but we felt that wasn’t enough, so we got some smart Nest Protect ones, that do both smoke and carbon monoxide detection, and talk to each other:

I mounted one in the living room area, and another in the bedroom:

 

Plus a third in the basement, to detect any fires down there:

 

The Nest detectors weren’t compatible with our Wi-Fi network, so I also got a Nest Wi-Fi router to help set them up (once set up, they communicate with a private network, so they’re not dependent on Wi-Fi):

The Nest router is installed in the internet cupboard, with an Ethernet connection to the Pepwave modem:

Our coach only has one entrance door. If we’re in the bedroom and a fire blocks access to that door, there is an emergency exit in the bedroom window; the red latches can be opened to swing the whole window up:

It’s a fairly small emergency exit, but better than being stuck back there. To make it easier to use, I got a pole that lives next to the window:

The pole can be used to hold the emergency exit open, for easier egress:

Hopefully we’ll never need to use it, but it should help if needed.