Most people buy a safe once, under time pressure, based on the size of the door and the price on the ticket. Then something happens and they find out what they actually bought. The labels are not difficult to read — they are just rarely explained.
Fire rating: time and temperature
A fire rating is a pair of numbers: how long the inside stays below a survivable temperature, and how hot the outside got while it did. One hour at 1700°F is a common rating for a decent document safe.
What matters is what you are protecting. Paper chars at around 400°F. Most fire safes are built and tested around keeping the interior below roughly 350°F, which protects documents. Digital media — drives, memory cards, film — gives up far earlier, closer to 125°F, and needs a safe specifically rated for media. Putting a backup drive in a standard fire safe and assuming it is covered is one of the more common and more expensive misunderstandings.
Fire protection is achieved with insulation. Burglary protection is achieved with steel. They are different problems and they are solved differently.
Burglary rating: how long it resists an attack
Burglary ratings describe how long a safe holds up against a person actively trying to get into it, with specified tools. A residential security container is built to slow down an opportunist. A higher-rated commercial safe is built with substantially thicker steel and hardplate to resist drilling.
Here is the thing worth knowing: many inexpensive fire safes carry no burglary rating at all. They are insulated boxes with a thin steel skin. They will do exactly what they promise in a fire and very little in a break-in.
Bolting it down is not optional
The most common way a home safe is defeated is not by being opened. It is by being picked up and taken somewhere with more time and better tools. A safe under 500lb should be anchored to the floor or the wall structure, and most safes come with pre-drilled holes for exactly that.
Where it goes matters too. A safe on an exterior wall is easier to work on than one boxed into a corner. A safe in plain sight in the master bedroom is the first place anybody looks.
Size it for later, not for now
Almost everybody outgrows their first safe. Documents accumulate, and the things you decide are worth locking up expand to fill whatever space exists. Buy larger than your current pile suggests — the price difference between sizes is much smaller than the cost of buying twice.
Combination, key or electronic?
- Mechanical dial. Slow to open, nothing to run out of power, extremely long-lived. Still the choice where reliability matters most.
- Electronic keypad. Fast, and the code can be changed in seconds when somebody leaves. Needs a battery change once a year.
- Biometric. Fastest of all, which matters for a safe you open daily. Read the reviews carefully — quality varies widely at the lower end.
Whichever you choose, change the factory code. Safes ship with a default set at the factory, it is printed in the manual, and the manual is on the internet.
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