Holiday innovation designed to save Christmas – and lives
This holiday season, Dave Murray wants your festivities to be merry and bright – but not too bright. That’s why he helped start a company called Extinguishing Ornaments.
Murray (Bachelor of Technology ’18, Industrial Heavy Equipment Technician ’08) is one of three cofounders of the Edmonton-based startup that makes a kind of mini-fire extinguisher that looks just like a Christmas-tree ornament. Should a fire break out, it douses the tree in a 360-degree spray of the same chemical found inside a full-sized extinguisher.
Every holiday season, fire departments see a spike in calls for residential fires – something Murray and his co-founders know firsthand, since all three are full-time firefighters themselves.
“Christmas is one of the busiest days of the year for fires,” Murray says.
“When we saw the significance of that, combined with our experience, we thought, ‘There has to be a simple fix.’”
Hundreds of fires, millions in property damage
Christmas trees don’t burst into flames every day, but the risk is real – and so are the consequences.
According to the National Fire Protection Association, firefighters in the United States respond to an average of 160 Christmas-tree-related fires every year. This results in an annual average of two deaths and US$12 million in property damage. Estimates in Canada are just as high.
Murray and his co-founders wanted to find a way to deal with this problem without exposing homeowners to unnecessary risk. That’s why Extinguishing Ornaments sits inside the Christmas tree, mounted to the trunk and disguised as just another decorative bauble.
These 4” Styrofoam balls are equipped with a sensing wire that detects when it comes into contact with flames. Should that happen, the ornament is engineered to burst open with enough force to spray extinguishing powder over the entirety of the tree and suppress a burgeoning blaze.
This leaves the homeowner free to safely exit the house and call 911, thereby turning what could have been a devastating tragedy into a minor inconvenience by comparison.
Extinguishing Ornaments work on real trees and artificial ones, and come with a five-year lifespan, just like a regular extinguisher. While similar products exist in the commercial and industrial sectors, these are the first products of their kind engineered specifically for a residential setting.
Trial and error
Murray and his cofounders, Brett Evers and Brad Cottell, created Extinguishing Ornaments in 2021, after hearing stories about Christmas-tree fires and deciding they were up for the challenge of designing a solution.
They discovered that certain industrial settings, such as engine rooms on ships, already used automatically activated fire extinguishers, and that this basic technology could be repurposed at a smaller scale.
They then spent a year working with a manufacturer to design prototypes and fine-tune the mechanics, so that the ornament would cover a normal-sized tree without also drenching the rest of the living room. Their firefighter training allowed them to run live-burn tests themselves.
The company’s first orders shipped out to the public through their website in fall 2022, and that’s how it continues to operate today – when Murray, Evers and Cottell aren’t actively fighting fires at their day jobs, that is.
Along the way the trio has worked with Edmonton Unlimited, the “innovation agency” of the City of Edmonton, to bolster the company’s business end. They also participated in Edmonton Startup Week, where Extinguishing Ornaments was named one of the city’s top 10 early startups.
Along with those mentors in the public and private sectors, Murray is quick to credit his NAIT education for helping prepare him for his second life as an entreprneur.
“The B.Tech [practicum] placements opened my eyes to a lot of business and entrepreneurship that inspired this venture,” he says. “It was that practical component that inspired me to apply all of the knowledge I learned – it’s a different world out there than what’s written in the books. The placements showed me how to actually interact in the business world.”
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Making safety ‘sexy’
Murray says that growth of the company has been slow but steady – a challenge he and his cofounders anticipated, given how little public awareness there is about the problem they’re aiming to solve.
“We identified through our research that this is really an unknown problem,” he says. “Although it’s a relatively small occurrence, it’s pretty significant. The majority of people we talk to aren’t even aware that their tree could catch fire. We want to create awareness around prevention.”
On the company’s Instagram page, for instance, you’ll see a series of posts riffing on the shirtless-firefighter theme in wall calendars. Only this time the photos are accompanied by reminders to keep your real trees well hydrated, warnings about leaving candles unattended, and tips on how to create your own home fire-escape plan.
“Our main goal is awareness and prevention, and we plan to do that by making safety sexy,” Murray says.
As their company continues raising awareness and getting its products onto trees across North America, Murray and his colleagues look to the future with hope: that the busier they are selling Extinguishing Ornaments, the quieter it will be for them on Christmas morning.