A man from England is sharing a serious warning after his $2 disposable grill set his house ablaze.

In June 2021, Paul O’Brien, 47, had invited a few friends over to watch a soccer match, cooking up a barbecue for one hour on the disposable grill at about one o’clock that afternoon.

Before he went to bed, around midnight, he threw the portable grill away in the trash, but woke up to his house later engulfed in flames, leaving about $127,000 in damages.

“The barbecue felt cold when I put it in the bin,” O’Brien told South West News Service. “I thought I knew how long the coals could smolder for.”

“I was wrong.”

At around 5 a.m. that morning, he suddenly heard a bang and woke up to his girlfriend screaming.

“Looking out of our bedroom, you could see the two kids’ bedrooms, and it was just bright orange,” O’Brien recalled. “You could hear this crackling noise – which was just wood cracking.”

He grabbed one of his sons while his girlfriend got the other, and they all made it out of his house just as the kitchen was going up in smoke.

The cinders from the barbecue had caught fire, spreading to his house.

They watched the house burn in flames for about three to four minutes before fire trucks arrived.

“We lost probably 95% of our possessions — photos and memories and just all the kids’ toys and clothes, all of that just went,” O’Brien said.

“We got out — that was the main thing.”

After the fire, the family lived in a temporary accommodation for two years, and have since moved back into their nearly $318,000 property.

“You think you know how to put out a barbecue, you think you’ve done the right thing,” O’Brien admitted. “The barbecue had been out for ten hours and you put it in the bin.”

“There was obviously just one little rogue ember in there that wasn’t out. It caused a hundred thousand pounds worth of damage just from this $2 barbecue.”

O’Brien worked with an insurance company to help repair the damage that was done to his house.

And now, in the wake of the fire, he’s pursuing his long thought about ambition to become a firefighter and has attended a number of house fires as part of the job.

He joined the Lancashire Fire and Rescue service as he feels like he was “giving back” to the community after the horrible incident.

He hasn’t attended a barbecue since the traumatic incident and urges others to take careful notice about their grilling appliances.

O’Brien even offered up some tips to take after using a grill, suggesting that people pour water on top of it to make sure everything has been burned out.

“You don’t realize how dangerous they are,” he told SWNS. “I’d say to anyone, ‘Just douse it in water, and then douse it again and then submerge it in water.’ ”

“Anything with hot coals — firepits, disposable barbecues — put water on it and make sure that they’re out.”

He added, “I thought they were out, and they weren’t, and we lost everything because of it.”