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What's on the ICC FE Extinguisher Technician Exam? 7 Domains

One hundred questions, all against NFPA 10, and sixty percent of them are service work rather than selection or placement.

September 3, 20262 min readICC® Portable Fire Extinguisher Technician
Contents

What's on the ICC FE Extinguisher Technician Exam? 7 Domains

The format

Questions100
Time2 hours
Book policyOpen - you bring your own references
DeliveryICC PRONTO remote proctoring, or a Pearson VUE test centre

One hundred questions in two hours is 72 seconds each. That is the tightest time budget in the ICC fire family, and it changes how you should use the open book: you will not have time to look up more than a fraction.

The seven domains, by weight

DomainWeight
Annual Maintenance25%
Selection, Placement and Installation20%
Recordkeeping and Safety16%
Hydrostatic Testing15%
Six-year and Internal Maintenance10%
Recharging10%
Inspection4%

It is a service exam, not a design exam

Add annual maintenance, six-year internal maintenance, hydrostatic testing and recharging together and you get 60% of the paper. Selection and placement, the part most people think of as extinguisher knowledge, is 20%.

If your day job is hanging extinguishers rather than servicing them, that ratio is the single most useful thing on this page.

One domain is not NFPA 10

Recordkeeping and Safety is 16%, and it splits. The recordkeeping half comes from NFPA 10, but the Safety Practices half is governed by 49 CFR 171-185, the federal hazardous-materials shipping regulations. That is a different document entirely, and it is free to read.

Where to start

Work the heaviest domain first and check yourself against the weighting, not against how interesting the material is. The published percentages are the closest thing to an answer key you get before exam day.

Our free 10-question practice test draws from the same weighted pool, so the mix you see is the mix the exam uses.

BC
Brandon Carlton
Founder, Fire Cert Academy

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