An extinguisher is the only piece of life-safety equipment in your building that a person has to pick up, carry, and operate under pressure. Everything about inspection comes back to that one moment: is it there, is it charged, and can somebody actually get to it. Fire & Safety Equipment III LLC has been inspecting extinguishers across Wisconsin, Iowa, and Illinois since 1975. We are not a national franchise working from a call-center script. We are a Platteville company with technicians based across the territory who know which buildings on their route have a cabinet that sticks, which kitchens keep moving the Class K unit onto a shelf, and which shops have a welder who empties a ten-pound ABC every spring. That kind of memory is worth more than a clipboard.
What the Annual Inspection Actually Covers
NFPA 10 requires that every portable fire extinguisher be inspected annually by a trained person. That word “inspection” gets used loosely in this trade, so here is what our technician is actually doing when they take a unit off the wall. First is the obvious: is the extinguisher in its designated place, is the seal and tamper indicator intact, and is the pressure gauge reading in the green. If the pin has been pulled or the seal is broken, the unit gets pulled for recharge regardless of what the gauge says. A broken seal means somebody squeezed the handle, and even a half-second discharge can unseat the valve enough to bleed pressure over the following months.
Then comes the physical exam. We check the shell for dents, corrosion, and pitting, particularly around the bottom chime where moisture collects on a concrete floor. We check the hose and nozzle for cracks and for the wasp nests and dirt-dauber mud that show up in agricultural buildings every summer. We check that the hose is not stiff or split at the crimp. We weigh the unit and compare it against the factory weight stamped on the nameplate, because a slow leak shows up on a scale long before it shows up on a gauge.
For dry chemical units we invert and shake the extinguisher to confirm the powder has not caked. Monoammonium phosphate absorbs moisture, and in a unit that has sat undisturbed on a wall in a humid basement for years it can pack into a solid plug at the bottom of the shell. A caked unit will read full on the gauge and fire nothing but propellant. That is one of the more common ways an extinguisher fails in the field, and there is no way to catch it without handling the unit.
Finally, the paperwork. Each unit gets a new service tag showing the month and year, the technician, and our license information. We leave you with a written report listing every extinguisher by location, type, size, and condition, plus anything that failed and why.
The Monthly Check Belongs to You
NFPA 10 also requires a monthly quick check, and that one is on the owner, not the service company. This trips up a lot of businesses when the fire marshal walks through, because the annual tag looks perfect and the back of the tag — where the monthly initials go — is blank.
The monthly check takes about thirty seconds per unit. Is it in its spot. Is the gauge in the green. Are the pin and seal intact. Is anything stacked in front of it. Is the sign or arrow still visible from across the room. Initial and date the back of the tag, or log it in whatever system your safety program uses.
We will train your staff on this at no charge during a service visit. It takes ten minutes, and it is the single cheapest thing you can do to keep an inspector satisfied and to catch a discharged unit in week two rather than month eleven.
If you would rather not manage it internally, we can move your account to a quarterly or monthly route so a technician does the walk-through for you. Most of our multi-building customers — schools, municipalities, larger manufacturers — go this way.
Placement, Travel Distance, and the Things People Move
Half of what we correct on an inspection is not the extinguisher itself. It is where the extinguisher ended up.
NFPA 10 sets maximum travel distances based on hazard classification. For Class A hazards the limit is 75 feet. For Class B it drops to 30 or 50 feet depending on the hazard level. In a commercial kitchen, the Class K unit must be within 30 feet of the cooking appliances. Those distances are measured the way a person actually walks — around the equipment, not through it.
Mounting height matters too. Units weighing 40 pounds or less mount with the top no higher than five feet off the floor; heavier units drop to three and a half feet. Nothing may sit closer than four inches to the floor. And an extinguisher must be visible, or its location must be marked so it is obvious from a distance.
In practice, extinguishers migrate. A pallet gets set in front of one. A shelving unit goes up over another. Somebody takes one off the wall to use as a doorstop, or moves it to a back room because it was in the way of a new workstation. On every annual visit we walk the building and flag anything that has drifted, and we remount and re-sign units as part of the service rather than just writing it up.
We also check that the extinguisher matches the hazard. A 2A:10B:C dry chem in a server room is a problem. A water unit near an energized panel is a bigger one. A kitchen with nothing but ABC units and no Class K is both a code violation and a genuinely dangerous situation, because dry chemical on a grease fire can splash burning oil out of the vat.
What Actually Fails
After fifty years of this, the failures fall into a short list.
Slow pressure loss
Usually a valve stem O-ring or a valve that never fully seated. The gauge drifts out of the green over a year or two. Caught on the scale before it is caught on the dial.
Caked powder
Humid storage, no movement, five to ten years. The unit is heavy, the gauge is green, and it will not discharge properly. This is exactly why the six-year internal maintenance interval exists.
Corroded shells
Common in wash-down areas, salt storage, car washes, and anywhere a unit sits on a wet floor. Pitting on a pressure vessel is not repairable — the unit is condemned.
Cracked hoses
UV exposure on outdoor and dock-mounted units, or simple age on anything past fifteen years. A hose that splits at the crimp under 195 psi is useless.
Missing or illegible nameplates
If the label is gone, the extinguisher cannot be verified against its factory weight or its rating, and NFPA 10 requires it be removed from service.
Obsolete units
Inverting-type extinguishers, soldered or riveted shells, and any unit manufactured before 1984 are no longer serviceable. We still find a surprising number hanging in older Wisconsin farm buildings and church basements. They get replaced, not repaired.
Six-Year Maintenance and Twelve-Year Hydrostatic Testing
An annual inspection is not the whole schedule. Stored-pressure dry chemical extinguishers require an internal examination at six years: the unit is discharged, opened, the powder inspected or replaced, the valve rebuilt with a fresh O-ring and gasket set, and the unit recharged and re-pressurized. Carbon dioxide and wet chemical units follow their own intervals.
At twelve years, dry chemical cylinders require hydrostatic testing under DOT and NFPA rules — pressurized well beyond service pressure to confirm the shell has not lost strength. CO₂ cylinders test at five years, as do high-pressure cartridges and wet chemical units.
We track these dates for you. Every unit on your report shows its manufacture date, last internal maintenance, and next hydro due date, so you are never caught out by an inspector finding a twelve-year-old cylinder with no test collar. When a batch comes due, we swap tested, tagged extinguishers from the truck onto your wall so you are never uncovered while your cylinders are in our shop. Our fire extinguisher service and recharge pages cover how that work is handled.
The Tag Is Not the Whole Story
There is a corner of this industry that sells tags. A truck shows up, somebody walks the building with a hole punch, every unit gets a fresh date, and an invoice arrives. Nothing was weighed. Nothing was inverted. Nothing came off the wall.
It is cheap, it satisfies a glance from an inspector, and it protects nobody. The reason we weigh every unit and physically handle every unit is that the failures listed above are invisible from three feet away. A tag records that an inspection happened; it does not perform one.
We would rather you asked us hard questions about this. Ask what your units weighed. Ask which ones we opened. Ask why a particular extinguisher got pulled. Our technicians can answer all of it, and the written report backs it up.
How the Visit Works
You call, or send us a message through the contact page. We ask how many buildings, roughly how many extinguishers, and whether you have kitchens, paint booths, server rooms, or vehicle fleets — those change what we bring on the truck.
On the day, a technician arrives in a marked truck with a stocked service body: replacement units, hoses, gauges, seals, tags, signage, brackets, and cabinet hardware. Most problems get fixed on site during the same visit. Units needing internal maintenance or hydrostatic testing come off the wall, and tested swap units go up in their place.
You get the written report before we leave, and a reminder from us the following year. We do not auto-bill, we do not lock you into a multi-year agreement, and we do not sub the work out to somebody you have never met.
If your building also has a kitchen suppression system or a paint booth system, the same technician can handle those on the same visit; hood cleaning is scheduled separately with our cleaning crew. One company, one invoice, one set of records. We also run hands-on fire extinguisher training for staff and fill and service CO₂ fire extinguishers.
The Codes Behind Extinguisher Inspection
Customers ask us all the time where the “rules” for extinguishers actually come from, because the fire inspector, the insurance auditor and the OSHA consultant all seem to be reading from different books. They are, a little. Three documents do most of the work, and they overlap on purpose. Here is how they fit together, so you know what is being asked of you and why.
Standard for Portable Fire Extinguishers
The technical standard the whole trade works from. It sets the monthly inspection, the annual maintenance, the six-year internal examination for stored-pressure dry chemical units and the hydrostatic test intervals (twelve years for most dry chemical, five years for CO₂, water and wet chemical). It also fixes how extinguishers are selected, mounted and spaced, and it lists the obsolete designs that must be removed from service regardless of condition.
Portable fire extinguishers (federal workplace rule)
The employer’s legal obligation wherever people work. It requires extinguishers to be kept fully charged and in their designated places, visually inspected monthly, given an annual maintenance check with a written record kept for at least a year, and distributed so that travel distance is 75 feet or less for Class A hazards and 50 feet or less for Class B. It also requires extinguisher education for employees when hired and annually after that.
The fire codes your inspector enforces
The local fire department does not enforce NFPA 10 directly. It enforces a fire code — NFPA 1 in Wisconsin, the International Fire Code in Iowa — and that code adopts NFPA 10 by reference for portable extinguishers. So when the fire marshal writes “extinguisher out of date” on a report, the requirement traces back through the fire code to NFPA 10, and the fix is the same annual maintenance we perform.
The numbers that get buildings written up
Most extinguisher citations come down to a handful of measurable requirements. Under NFPA 10, the top of an extinguisher weighing 40 pounds or less may be no more than five feet off the floor; heavier units are mounted with the top no higher than three and a half feet; and the bottom of any extinguisher must sit at least four inches above the floor. Extinguishers must be conspicuous, along normal paths of travel, and never blocked by stock or equipment. Travel distance to a Class A extinguisher is 75 feet maximum, to a Class K unit in a kitchen 30 feet, and to a Class B extinguisher 30 or 50 feet depending on the rating of the unit and the hazard. Every unit needs a legible tag showing the month and year of its last maintenance and who performed it, and stored-pressure units that have had internal maintenance or a recharge carry a verification-of-service collar under the valve. NFPA 10 also declares certain extinguishers obsolete — soda-acid, inverting cartridge water units, chemical foam, copper or brass shells with soldered or riveted seams, CO₂ units with metal horns, and stored-pressure dry chemical units manufactured before October 1984 — and those come off the wall no matter how good they look.
What Wisconsin, Iowa and Illinois require
In Wisconsin, the state Fire Prevention Code, Wis. Admin. Code ch. SPS 314, adopts NFPA 1, the Fire Code, with state modifications and applies it to every public building and place of employment. NFPA 1 in turn requires portable extinguishers to be selected, installed, inspected and maintained in accordance with NFPA 10, and its annual maintenance provision calls for a certified person; SPS 314 notes that the state does not issue that certification, which is why it comes through manufacturer and industry programs rather than a Wisconsin license. On top of that, Wis. Stat. § 101.14(2) makes the local fire chief the state’s deputy and requires the fire department to inspect every public building and place of employment at least once in each non-overlapping six-month period, unless the department has adopted one of the alternative schedules the statute allows. That is the inspector who walks in twice a year in Platteville, Madison and Milwaukee, and expired extinguisher tags are among the easiest things for them to find.
In Iowa, the state fire code rules — Iowa Admin. Code 481—Chapter 280, Fire Control Administration — adopt the 2024 edition of the International Fire Code with Iowa amendments, enforced by the Iowa State Fire Marshal Division and local fire departments in Dubuque, Cedar Rapids, Davenport, Iowa City and Waterloo. IFC Section 906 requires portable extinguishers in the occupancies it lists and requires them to be selected, installed and maintained per NFPA 10. Illinois handles fire prevention through the Office of the State Fire Marshal, which adopts the NFPA 101 Life Safety Code statewide, with cities and fire protection districts adopting their own fire codes on top; in the northern Illinois communities we serve, extinguisher requirements come from those local codes and from OSHA. Across all three states, if you have employees, 29 CFR 1910.157 applies regardless of what the local fire code says.
None of this changes what we do on the wall. NFPA 10 is the common denominator, and an extinguisher maintained to NFPA 10 by a trained technician, with the tag and collar to prove it, satisfies the fire code in every jurisdiction we work in. What the state rules change is who shows up to check and how often — and in Wisconsin especially, that is more often than most owners expect.
- NFPA 10, Standard for Portable Fire Extinguishers — National Fire Protection Association
- 29 CFR 1910.157, Portable fire extinguishers — Occupational Safety and Health Administration
- Wis. Admin. Code ch. SPS 314, Fire Prevention — Wisconsin Legislature
- Iowa Admin. Code 481—Chapter 280, Fire Control Administration — Iowa Legislature
Since 1975
Fire & Safety Equipment III LLC has been headquartered in Platteville, Wisconsin for five decades, with technicians based across Wisconsin, Iowa and northern Illinois. We are a distributor for Amerex, ANSUL, and Pyro-Chem, which means the parts are genuine, the training is current, and your warranty stays intact.
Most of our work comes from customers who have been with us for twenty or thirty years and from the people they send us. That is the whole marketing plan. If you want to know how we handle a building, ask somebody in Platteville or Dubuque who already uses us. Read the full story.
Where We Inspect
Our trucks run a regular route through southwest Wisconsin, eastern Iowa, and northern Illinois. If your site is on one of these routes, your annual inspection can usually be scheduled within a week, and we will group multiple buildings onto a single visit so you are not paying for three trips.
Iowa
Wisconsin
Questions We Get Asked
How often do fire extinguishers need to be inspected?
Annually by a trained technician, and monthly by someone on your staff. The annual is a hands-on inspection with the unit off the wall and on a scale. The monthly is a thirty-second visual check that gets initialed on the back of the tag.
Who is allowed to perform the annual inspection?
NFPA 10 requires a trained and certified person. In Wisconsin and Iowa that means a licensed servicing company. Our technicians are licensed and carry current certification for the equipment we service.
What happens if an extinguisher fails inspection?
It depends on the failure. A low gauge or broken seal means a recharge. Caked powder means internal maintenance. A corroded or pitted shell, a missing nameplate, or a pre-1984 unit means replacement. We tell you which category each unit falls into and what it costs before we do anything.
Do you charge per inspection or per extinguisher?
Per extinguisher, with a trip charge we waive on larger buildings and multi-site accounts. Call with a rough count and we will give you a number over the phone rather than making you wait on a proposal.
My gauge is in the green. Is the extinguisher fine?
Not necessarily. The gauge only reads propellant pressure. It cannot tell you whether the powder has caked into a solid plug, whether the hose has split, or whether the shell has corroded from the inside. That is why the annual inspection involves weighing and handling every unit.
How long does an inspection take?
Roughly two to four minutes per extinguisher once we are in the building, plus walking time. A twenty-unit building is usually done in about ninety minutes. Larger facilities we schedule across a morning.
Can you service extinguishers we bought somewhere else?
Yes. We service all major brands regardless of where they were purchased, as long as the unit is not obsolete and the nameplate is legible.
Do you provide the monthly inspection log?
Yes. We leave a log sheet and can post a laminated route map showing every extinguisher location in the building. We will also train your staff on the monthly check during the annual visit, at no charge.
Tell us what you have and where you are.
Extinguishers, a kitchen system, a hood, a booth — one visit, one invoice. We reply the same business day.
5675 Southwest Rd, Platteville, WI 53818 · Mon–Thu 8:00–4:30, Fri 8:00–2:00