Do you have something extremely valuable at home? Don’t worry, you don’t have to answer us. Let it be your secret. But then you understand what it means to keep your belongings safe.
If you haven’t already, you’d be thinking of getting a home safe. To be honest, home safes are not the best options for certain items. An ideal place for items such as your precious jewelry or other valuables is a bank. They offer more protection than home safes will
But if you want to keep items such as tape, hard drives, DVDs, documents, certificates, and records are near impossible to replace, home safes offer the type of protection you’re looking for.
While inexpensive compared to banks, they offer adequate protection for birth and death certificates, passports, important documents, electronic storage media, or even ammunition you’ve acquired to defend your home.
Important Things to Consider When Getting a Home Safe
Choosing a home safe can be tricky, but if you know what to look out for, the process becomes easier.
1. The size
For starters, you need to know the size of your safe. Stacking the items you’ll put in the safe in a neat pile and measure the size of the pile, both height and width is an easy way to determine the size of safe. Try adding a more height to the dimension because as time progresses, chances are, you will get more valuable documents for yourself and your family. You don’t want to leave the safety of the future documents to chance.
2. Protection
It’s most likely your main concern for choosing a safe is fire. Good thing most safes protect from fire and theft, some also throw in water protection into the mix.
Safety from Water
Choosing an appropriate safe for your documents can depend a lot on where you live. For instance, if where you live is prone to flooding, your best option for a safe that is also water resistant.
Safety from Fire
In case of fire outbreaks, paper documents have to be protected from temperatures above 350 degrees. Go for a safe whose internal temperature will not exceed this temperature during a fire accident. However, tapes, hard drives, and other electronic storage media don’t survive temperatures above 150 degrees. If tapes are among the items that will go in the safe, look for safes that won’t rise above this temperature. This is easy to look for – the information is provided in the safe.
Safety from Burglars
Most house safes are built to withstand burglars. Here’s what Consumer Reports says about safes: “Independent ratings for burglary resistance are less common for home safes than for ones made for commercial users, such as jewelry stores. To determine their burglary-resistance ratings, UL testers go at safes with tools, torches, and even explosives, Drengenberg says. A TL-15 rated safe, for example, can withstand an attack of at least 15 minutes using common tools.”
3. The lock style
Keep an eye on the kind of locks or the locking mechanism your preferred safe comes with. It’s generally good to go for safes that come with two locks. These types of safes provide the best level of protection for thieves.
4. Portability
Home safes are basically of two types: the Portable and the Unmovable types. While there are portable options available, it’s better to go for safes that aren’t portable to lower the chances of theft – portable safes face a higher risk of being stolen since they are easily movable.
5. Your budget
Protecting your valuables is an investment you are making, not just for the present but for the future. For this reason, you need to pick the best safe that falls within your budget. Opting for a low-grade safe when you could have afforded better is a bad idea. You might say “with luck nothing is going to happen”. But are you willing to depend on luck for the safety of your documents or storage media? Of course not.
Murphy’s Law states that if anything can go wrong, it will go wrong. And a lot of things can go wrong. Make the investment.
6. What do others say about the dealers
Go online and make an effort to search for reviews on the dealers and manufacturers. More often than not, the opinions of others who have used the safe you are interested in will give honest reviews about the product. That way you will know what you’re getting into. Aside from the sales talks, features and benefits of the sale on sale, find out how it really performs in service.
If you need more information about making a choice on what safe to buy or need professional help with safe installation, don’t hesitate to contact us.