How out of date are your flares?

[Shearwater]

But has anyone fired any (not in a SOS situation) in date flares to judge whether they work fresh ex factory? It all seems a bit suspect to me, easy to blame an OOD situation for duff ones, but how do we know in dte ones work?

 

[duncan99210]

Not being in the position to fund letting off lots of my own pyrotechnics, I recently went to a demo day laid on the the coastguard. There were about twenty folks there, each of whom was given the chance to fire either a handheld smoke or handheld flare. No failures out of that sample. The handheld flare burned with a surprising amount of smoke, more than the red smokes. They also kicked out a lot of ash but not much in the way of sparks.
I've fired a number of out of date flares (not more than 24 months out of date). Again, a fairly small sample but in the region of a dozen or so. About 25% of those either failed to fire at all or were lethargic in their performance (not much red smoke, short burn times, dull red flare).