Expert Warns Bedding and Laptops Don't Mix

Fire officials say the flames that destroyed a Fishersville home earlier this week were likely caused by a computer on a bed in a second story bedroom.

Computer experts say they aren't surprised that a computer could be the cause of a fire.

In fact, Jimmy Jones of LCC Computers says he's surprised it doesn't happen more often.

Jones says, the minute you turn your laptop computer on, the temperature inside rises to 120 degrees. That's when the fan kicks in to keep the inside cool.

However, more often than not, that fan is located on the bottom of the computer.

If the computer is sitting on a hard surface, enough air is getting in, but if it's on something soft, like a bed, all that heat keeps building.

"If you accidentally leave it at home all day, and it's sitting there on the bed and not breathing and on, it can definitely cause a fire, especially if it's on bedspread material like that. It's going to get hot enough to ignite that eventually," says Jones.

He says full-blown fires starting because of this is pretty rare, but Jones does perform a lot of repairs to motherboards that have warped inside because of the same heat issue.

He says those people are lucky to have only damaged their computer, not their home.