When in the market for fireproof safes, it’s important to know exactly what your needs are. There is no reason to pay more when you don’t have to, and with prices easily over ten thousand dollars on off-the-shelf models available to the general public, it pays – literally – do exercise your due diligence as a consumer.
Of course, those more expensive safes offer all kinds of gee-whiz gadgetry that most people are unlikely to truly need, features such as electronic locks and so forth. But even more moderately priced models can be expensive if you don’t actually require all the great things about them.
For example, do you truly need three hour fire protection? Do you even need two? The average fire burns for twenty minutes. If you live in a big city, with its own full-time fire department, chances are that a safe rated for only one hour of protection will do just fine.
Another thing to keep in mind when shopping around is whether your floor will bear the weight of the safe! You may even need a properly licensed building engineer to conduct an inspection, just in case, especially if the safe is to be placed on an elevated floor. And speaking building structures and safe weights, you’ll need to also consider whether something like impact protection is necessary. A safe’s impact rating tells you whether it can withstand a three-story building collapse. This may be an important feature in cases where fire causes the floor or ceiling to weaken and fail.
You will also need to consider whether you will be storing only paper documents or media such as computer disks. Fire safes have to be designed specifically to handle media such as CDs, film, and so forth because of their much lower melting point. Conventional ones will protect only paper, which can withstand heat over four hundred degrees Fahrenheit.