Posted By TBC I haven't seen one with the warning about the body on before, but it does get a bit cold and frosts up.

Posted By Allen Higginson I know that it has been relayed through through a hospital fire officer that there was an instance of a nurse who discharged a CO2 extinguisher while holding it by the body,with the result that she damaged her hand when she panicked and pulled her hand free.How true this is I don't know but in the large fixed extinguishers that we use (45KG of gas)your gloves stick to the bottom of the cylinder after discharge.

Posted By JB Thanks for the comments so far but it now transpires that there are 2 differing warning notices on similar extinguishers from the same supplier. One says don't hold the horn, the other says nothing about the horn, but warns not to hold the body. I'm now approaching the supplier to clarify the position because this is far from satisfactory. By the way, the extinguishers are from a well known supplier.

Posted By Mark Evans Just a quick point. You can get safety discharge horns fitted to your extinguishers, which work by using a gap between the inner horn and outer horn. Which helps if the horn is accidently touched during discharge (although most training makes a point of telling people not to..).

Posted By JB We've completed our risk assessment into the use of extinguishers and this has highlighted a further issue with CO2 extinguishers. There are 3 similar CO2 extinguishers but they carry different warnings -1) do not hold the horn, 2) do not hold the body 3) do not hold the horn or the body. This is confusing and could lead to users holding a particular model incorrectly, resulting in freeze burns. In an emergency situation we can not expect users to read the warning to see which version of CO2 extinguisher they are using. Therefore, we have requested the supplier to change them all over to one version. This will enable us to issue clear instructions during our fire training programme. Has anyone else had similar problems?