How to choose a safe for home - tips and tricks

In almost every house there is valuable property that may be of interest to thieves. First of all, we are talking about cash, jewelry, some important documents, family heirlooms. To ensure their safety will help safe. If you are already set up to purchase a durable and reliable metal cabinet to hide your values, then it is time to think about its design and installation location.

Today we’ll talk about which safe for home to choose. This question is not idle. Having given him insufficient attention, you can ultimately buy a safe that will not bring you peace of mind and confidence in the future, since it will not be able to become a serious obstacle to an attacker.

Determine the type of safe design

What dangers can threaten the values ​​stored in your home? First, they can simply be abducted. Secondly, they can die in a fire, from which none of us, alas, are safe. (Of course, floods, earthquakes, tornadoes, tsunamis, etc. can be added to this list, but the likelihood of all these emergency situations is incomparably lower.) Safes can protect your documents, money, jewelry from both of them. But ... you have to choose what to fear more, because most safes are not able to equally reliably protect from fire and hacking. A fire-resistant safe will not stop a professional teddy bear, and a burglar-proof safe will not save from fire.

Fireproof Safes

According to statistics, in the vast majority of cases, the danger to valuables stored in a house comes from fire, and not from intruders who illegally entered your home. Nevertheless, fire-resistant safes are still less likely to be acquired than burglar-proof ones - as a rule, only when it comes to the storage of some personal documents, photographs, family heirlooms, very expensive for you, but not of special value to thieves .

A fire-resistant safe is designed for long-term protection of things stored in it from the effects of temperatures of several hundred degrees. This is achieved by filling the space between the inner and outer walls of the safe with refractory foam concrete with a finely porous structure and, as a result, low thermal conductivity. To ensure the fire-resistant properties of the door, a so-called thermal lock and / or heat-insulating gaskets expand when heated.

The average fire-resistant safe provides protection of its contents from fire for 30-60 minutes. This, as a rule, is enough to extinguish the flame by the forces of the called firefighters. Some more expensive models are able to resist heat for 120, and sometimes even 240 minutes. In general, all safes are divided into 6 classes in accordance with their fire resistance. The criteria on the basis of which a metal box is assigned to one or another class are the time of permissible heat exposure and the maximum temperature inside the safe when the external temperature increases to 1100 ° С.

The maximum temperature inside the safe in case of fire determines the type of storage facilities. So, for example, safes that maintain temperatures up to 170 ° C are designed to store paper documents, and in the so-called data-safes, which ensure that the temperature inside does not rise above 50 ° C, you can store magnetic storage media (flash devices, CD and DVD discs, etc.).

Do not forget that fireproof safes protect only from flames and are not able to stop the cracker.They are not even attached to the wall or floor, as burglar resistant, as this can adversely affect the ability to withstand elevated temperatures. It follows that such safes should be hidden as far as possible from prying eyes.

Burglar-proof safes

The main characteristic of burglar-proof safes is their resistance to breaking, established on the basis of test results. Guaranteed good burglar resistance can heavy high-strength concrete, which poured the space between the outer and inner walls of the safe (sometimes the concrete is additionally reinforced with metal, granite chips or corundum). Thanks to such a “stuffing”, burglar-proof safes turn out to be significantly heavier than fire-resistant ones.

In accordance with the experimentally established resistance to cracking of safes, all of them are divided into several classes:

1. H0 Class Safes They are relatively simple metal crates with wall thicknesses up to 5 mm; they are designed to protect against dishonest guests or employees rather than burglars.

2. Safes I-II class usually used for storing documents at home, relatively small amounts of money and weapons.

3. Class III safes protection is acquired by those who are going to store large sums of money and especially expensive jewelry at home.

4. Safes corresponding to IV-VII classes burglary resistance, classified as professional, they are designed to ensure the safety of money, jewelry and documentation in bank premises, but by private individuals they are practically not used.

Of course, if we are talking about a burglar-proof safe, we should not forget about the need to equip it with a high-quality lock, otherwise the super strong walls and door will be worthless. We also note that the best option to ensure the safety of your valuables involves an integrated approach: it is not enough just to equip a reliable storage, you still need to connect the house to the remote control system.

In 10-15 minutes after the sensors are triggered, a police squad will arrive in place, which nullifies the chances of criminals making money. If the attacker who infiltrated your home has enough time, he will be able, sooner or later, to cope with any, even the most reliable safe.

Fireproof safes

We stated a little higher that all safes have their own specialization. But, as you know, there are exceptions to each rule. In this case, the exception is the category of universal safes capable of performing both functions. Fire-resistant models that will help to preserve the property above during robbery and fire are rare and are quite expensive. In addition, they, as a rule, provide the minimum of acceptable levels of protection, corresponding to the lower classes in terms of fire and burglary resistance.

A variety of fire-resistant safes are models made on the principle of "two in one": a burglar-proof storage is located inside the fire-resistant box. Such safes do both tasks better, but not everyone can afford them.

Types of locks used in safes

Burglar resistance of a safe is primarily determined not by the thickness of its “armor”, but by the reliability of the lock installed on it. Today, safes are equipped with three types of locks: key, code (which, in turn, can be mechanical or electronic) and biometric.

Key lock

You should not think that in our age of digital technology, key locks are preparing for a well-deserved retirement. No, they are still used more often than any other. Cylindrical locks are extremely rarely installed on safes - preference is given to lever locks, more resistant to the use of master keys and force breaking. To increase the reliability of safes, two locks are sometimes installed on them, the keys to which are strongly recommended to be hidden in different places.

An additional element of protection can be an electronic chip placed on the key itself. The locking device will be locked without recognizing the chip. Such a system allows you to protect against the use of duplicate keys made from an impression.

Mechanical combination lock

Mechanical combination locks, often referred to as limb locks, are strongly associated in the minds of most of us with safes. Such a constipation involves the introduction of a code combination of numbers, for which there is a rotary knob on the outside of the door with a scale from 0 to 99. Trying to guess the code with a simple exhaustive search is pointless - taking into account the number of possible combinations, this will take months, or even years. The reliability of the combination lock depends to a large extent on the ability of the owner to keep the code secret.

Electronic combination lock

Electronic combination locks have a number of significant advantages over mechanical ones. Electronics is more flexible in operation. Such a lock can be programmed to the mode that best suits your security requirements. If desired or necessary, you can easily change the code (in the case of many mechanical combination locks, this operation is impossible in principle). In addition, the electronic mechanism has a protection function against combination selection. However, it should be borne in mind that electronics often malfunctions than mechanics, in the case of safes this can be fraught with troubles.

Biometric lock

A biometric device identifies the owner of the safe by some unique individual parameters. This can be, for example, fingerprints or a view of the retina. Such safe locks are much more expensive than classic ones. Before choosing a safe with a biometric lock for your home, think about whether it turns out that the cost of the storage will exceed the cost of its contents. It hardly makes sense to chase this trend of safe fashion, because traditional constipation cope with the task no worse.

In conclusion, we will give you some tips regarding choosing a lock system for your home safe:

Choosing a safe deposit box

There is no safe that cannot be opened. The success of the enterprise depends on the quality of the store itself, the level of qualification of the cracker and the time that will be allocated to him for work. Having safely hidden the safe from prying eyes, you will increase the time required to commit theft, which means that the likelihood that the thief will abandon his undertaking or that he will be caught at the crime scene by a police order that arrived at the signal will increase. By the method of placement, all safes are divided into several types.

Built-in safes

Built-in safes in terms of the time required to find them, the most ideal. They are easy to disguise with furniture, interior elements, decorative panels used in the decoration of the room. In addition, the wall due to its mass significantly increases the burglary and fire resistance of the storage.

However, such a safe can only be installed in a house with brick walls or aerated concrete blocks. However, you can mount a metal box not only in the wall, but also in the floor, but only if the room is located on the ground floor of the building.And in that, and in another case, you need to make a niche (or, at least, very desirable) at the construction stage.

Freestanding safes

Freestanding safes are a classic home storage for documents, money, jewelry and other valuables. The vast majority of home safes belongs to this category. Such boxes are acquired in cases where it is impossible to build a safe into the wall for some reason.

To increase the reliability of the store, it should be attached to the wall, having previously mounted a powerful metal frame, or to a reinforced concrete platform on the floor. As well as in the case of built-in safes, you need to do everything possible so that the freestanding structure is not striking when entering the room.

Furniture safes

Furniture safes are relatively lightweight structures placed inside cabinets or cabinets. It's hard to call them reliable repositories. Firstly, it’s impossible to install a thick-walled safe inside the furniture, which means it’s quite heavy, which implies that they all have a low burglary resistance class. Secondly, such a cache will be discovered immediately by an attacker, since in most cases thieves begin to search for values ​​from cabinets, cabinets and chests of drawers.

Portable safes

Portable safes are essentially diplomats with reinforced metal walls and locks. They are used to transport documents and relatively small amounts of money. Of course, safes with such a low weight cannot possess good protective properties - it will not be difficult for a criminal to steal such a cashbox entirely. To increase reliability, such products are often equipped with additional beacons. One of the varieties of portable safes is car boxing.

Safe dimensions and internal division

The sizes of safes can vary in a fairly wide range, but for home use a compact model will be quite enough. In order not to make a mistake with the dimensions of the purchased product, you should determine in advance the quantity and type of property to be saved. So, for example, if only money is supposed to be stored in a safe, then its internal dimensions can be only a little more than a couple or three packs of banknotes, while a document storage should obviously contain A4-size paper.

But even if the size of the valuables to be stored is more than modest, you should not buy an excessively small safe, otherwise it will be inconvenient to use it.

Experts recommend instead of one large safe to purchase a few smaller ones. An attacker who finds one of the safes is unlikely to continue the search. But even if he manages to calculate the location of all the vaults, opening several locks is time-consuming, and this is not in the interests of the thief.

In most cases, safes are equipped with shelves, compartments and cells for convenient placement of things stored there. The organization of the internal space of a safe depends primarily on its internal dimensions. Owners of the smallest models have to be content with one department.