How to Choose the Right Safe

A safe is the last line of defence for your cash on hand and essen­tial papers in a home and the office. Mak­ing sure you’ve invest­ed in the right one can make the dif­fer­ence between keep­ing your valu­ables secure and los­ing pre­cious doc­u­ments and per­son­al trea­sures.

Pay atten­tion to fire pro­tec­tion, not just crime pre­ven­tion

Peo­ple under­es­ti­mate the risk of fire. Busi­ness own­ers are right­ly scared of bur­glar­ies; after all, about 200,000 go down in the coun­try year­ly. But fire is not far behind, at about 100,000 sep­a­rate inci­dents per year, many of which cause prop­er­ty dam­age.

When buy­ing a safe, check the fire safe­ty rat­ing. This will usu­al­ly be mea­sured in the num­ber of hours the safe can be exposed to a typ­i­cal fire with­out being com­pro­mised.

These rat­ings are not 100% accu­rate, as they are based on a “typ­i­cal” heat much low­er than many fires. If an entire room goes up in a flashover, it’s unlike­ly that a safe is going to last its full rat­ing.

As a good rule of thumb, a fire rat­ing of less than 1 hour is func­tion­al­ly use­less. Try to get with 1–2 hours of safe­ty to ensure your valu­ables remain pro­tect­ed. If you live in a rur­al area or an under­served neigh­bour­hood, go for over 2.

Check the cash rat­ing

A cash rat­ing is entire­ly sep­a­rate from the fire rat­ing. Some safes have excel­lent cash rat­ings but ter­ri­ble fire rat­ings, and vice ver­sa. You need to con­sid­er the two val­ues sep­a­rate­ly.

A cash rat­ing is less sci­en­tif­ic than the fire rat­ing. It is the max­i­mum insur­able amount of cash that can go in the safe, as deter­mined by expert exam­i­na­tion of the hinges’ strength, the lock­’s com­plex­i­ty, and the met­al cas­ing’s resis­tance.

Just because a safe is rat­ed for a giv­en amount of cash does not mean you need to be lim­it­ed by that amount. Sup­pose your busi­ness is locat­ed in a safe neigh­bour­hood. In that case, you may even be able to con­vince your insur­ance com­pa­ny to cov­er a high­er amount of on-premis­es cash than your safe man­u­fac­tur­er sug­gests.

Addi­tion­al­ly, you can roll the dice and keep non-insur­ance floats on hand, eat­ing the loss­es if you do suf­fer a bur­glary.

Still, keep­ing your approx­i­mate cash float in mind when shop­ping for safes is good. You do not want to pay too much, but you also do not want to have a large float that insur­ance will not cov­er.

Always choose the com­bi­na­tion lock

In the movies, safe­crack­ers often fig­ure out the com­bi­na­tion by hear­ing when the wheels lock-in. In real­i­ty, with mod­ern safes, this rarely hap­pens. Com­bi­na­tion locks are incred­i­bly safe and are much more con­ve­nient. Because it’s eas­i­er to keep track of a set of num­bers than a phys­i­cal key, buy­ing a com­bi­na­tion safe now could save you a lot of has­sle lat­er.