The Fire Dept. here has a trailer that they use to teach fire safety to the public. You go in the door on one end of the trailer, and have to crawl, and feel your way around to get safely to the other door. There are no electric lights, and it's kind of dark inside. It's filled with cotton candy smoke. There are heating elements in some of the doors, so those doors get warm, and some of the door knobs get warm too. They don't get hot enough to burn anyone. Warm doors, and doors with warm doorknobs are not to be opened, since there's probably a fire behind them. They'll take it to schools, and community events when asked. When possible, they'll train people to use the fire hoses too.
Before we moved in here, we rented a house. One night, Dh woke up, because he was smelling that electrical, wire melting type smell. We walked all through the house. Nothing even closely suspicious. The smell was only in one area of the house, which was down a hallway. There was nothing plugged in, no night light or anything, and the walls were not warm, etc. After a short time, Dh called the fire dept. When they arrived, he told told them it might be coming from the attic, and part of the A/C unit was up there.
They brought in a camera. It was a FLIR type camera that had been specially programmed for firefighters, to detect heat signatures. The camera also sent the images, and other imformation to a tablet. Sure enough, the attic had a hot spot. The cautiously climed into the attic, and there was nothing the normal sensed would have been able to detect, except the smell. No billowing smoke, no sparks, nothing. That camera showed them it was behind a panel on the A/C unit up there. They cautiously opened the pannel, and when the air hit it, it flared up. We turned off the A/C unit, which surprisingly was still running as usual. They used a type of fire extinguisher to take care of it. It's not like you can spray water, or a liquid based fire retardant into an attic, onto an electrical panel.
Make no mistake, they saved our bacon, and we were grateful. It was impressive they way they detected, and solved the problem. They took great pains to do the least amount of damage possible, and for the most part, they cleaned up after themselves. I called the Fire Cheif's wife the next day, and told her to tell her husband we were very impressed with how they handled everything BUT not even one of the firefighters looked like the hot guys in their calandars. She got a good laugh out of that. Yeah, in all her years attending events with her husband, she assured me that most of them did NOT look anything close to the ones in the calandars.