---
title: "A Grease Fire on an Open-Burner Range: What to Do in the First Ten Seconds"
description: "How to put out grease fire on stove safely, why water and flour make it worse, when to leave, and why the hood over an open burner matters."
url: "https://vikingmiami.support/blog/grease-fire-on-a-stove/"
date_modified: "2026-08-21"
Category: "Safety & Risks"
---


# A Grease Fire on an Open-Burner Range: What to Do in the First Ten Seconds

**If the flame has reached the hood, or does not go out within a second or two of being covered, leave the house and call 911 from outside.** Nothing below is worth staying for.

## How to put out grease fire on stove: the ten seconds

- **Turn the burner off** — only if you can reach the control without passing your arm over the pan.- **Cover it.** A metal lid or a flat baking sheet, slid on **from the side**, keeping your hand behind it. Dropping a lid straight down splashes burning oil.- **Leave it covered.** Ten minutes at least. Lifting the lid to check reintroduces the air you just removed.- **Do not move the pan.** Not to the sink, not outside. Almost every serious injury from a kitchen fire happens while somebody is carrying one.

## The three things that make it worse

**Water.** It flashes to steam on contact with burning oil and throws that oil upward and outward. This is the mechanism behind most injuries from grease fires and it is worth knowing viscerally rather than intellectually.

**Flour.** People reach for it because it looks like baking soda. Fine flour suspended in air is combustible, and throwing a cloud of it at a flame is exactly the wrong shape.

**The hood.** Running the extractor pulls flame and burning grease into a duct with its own grease lining it. Switch it off if it is on.

## Why the appliance matters here

A professional open burner delivers considerably more heat than the cooktop it replaced. Oil that used to take four minutes to reach its smoke point now takes ninety seconds, and people cook the way they always have on an appliance that is not the same one.

That is not a criticism of the range. It is the reason it was bought. It is also the reason the pan gets away from people in the first year more often than in the tenth.

## The hood above it is part of the risk

An open-burner range throws more grease into a hood than a domestic cooktop, and in this climate that hood is also moving humid, salt-carrying air across its blower every day. Baffle filters that go unwashed become the fuel above the fire.

Monthly filter cleaning over a burner like this is not fussiness. It is the difference between a pan fire staying a pan fire and a pan fire finding somewhere to go.

## Afterwards

Do not put the range back into service until it has been looked at. Heat that reached the underside of a hood, the control panel of a range, or the wiring behind either has done something that is not visible from the front, and a burner that lights afterwards is not evidence that everything else is sound.

---

**[Read full article: A Grease Fire on an Open-Burner Range: What to Do in the First Ten Seconds](https://vikingmiami.support/blog/grease-fire-on-a-stove/)**