Never leave your water bottle in the car: It can be a potential fire hazard!

Now that summer is finally here in full swing, you should all be upping your water consumption. Not only could dehydration be as bad as smoking, water is also one of the healthiest ways to keep your body temperature regulated in hot weather. However, do pay attention to how you drink your water. For example, as per experts, you should never drink cold water in hot weather or drink hot water from the tap.

Apart from this, even though all of us should keep a jug of water with us throughout the day to enable us to adequately hydrate, you should not be leaving your water bottle in your car. Here's the reason why that could be responsible for some potentially dangerous situations.

You should not leave water bottle in your car

Leaving your bottle of water in the car seems like a very regular and harmless habit most of us have. However, as reported by Stuff, it could be a potential fire hazard.

The reason why this happen is due to physics! When the light beams from the sun filters though the bottle filled with liquid, it acts as a magnifying glass. A focused beam through the clear liquid could then start a fire!

The article quotes David Richardson of the Midwest Fire Department who explains,

The sunlight will come through, when it's filled with liquid, and act as a magnifying glass as you would with regular optics.

It uses the liquid and the clear material to develop a focused beam and sure enough, it can actually cause a fire, a combustion.

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How likely are you to start a fire this way?

The possibility of a fire breaking out from a bottle left in your car is low, but it can still happen. So it is better to err on the side of caution, and not take your chances. As the Midwest City Fire Department showed in a controlled demonstration, light refracted through a bottle of water could cause to burn a hole through a piece of paper. However, as the firefighter explained,

This was a clear bottle with a clear fluid in it.

If this was empty or partially filled, it probably wouldn't have worked or magnified this. Keep in mind that all the factors have to be in place for this to work.

This underlines the fact that given the right conditions, bottled water in the car could cause combustion and pose as fire hazard. Even though it is a possibility, fortunately, most of us are realistically unlikely to experience such instances.

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Sources used:

Stuff: 'Why you should never leave a bottle of water in the car'