Choosing a Home Safe
If you have valuables in your home that you want to protect from theft, then it is a good idea to get a home safe. Your valuable items may include jewelery, watches, money, digital cameras, mobile phones and MP3 players. Wills, birth certificates, passports, insurance papers, deeds and family photos are paper documents that you may consider valuable and worth protecting. People today also have digital data that they consider valuable, and would want to protect. This digital data may be stored on USB drives, CDs, DVDs or memory sticks. This digital data may include digital documents, digital photos, MP3 music and email documents. For people who work from home, you will want to protect all your home business digital data and business documents.
Besides theft, the other main threat for your valuables is fire. Storing your valuables in a reputable home fireproof safe will give you peace of mind that your valuables are safe against both theft and fire. There are many makes and models of home safe that are rated as fireproof, but it is important to check that a home safe has the proper fireproof accreditation before buying it.
The organization that tests safes to determine exactly how fireproof different types of safes (from different manufacturers) are is the Underwriters Laboratory (UL). You should preferably buy a home safe that has an Underwriters Laboratory (UL) rating. The UL rating specifies the external temperature in degrees Fahrenheit that a safe can withstand, and also how long a safe can withstand that temperature. For a home safe, you should ensure that the safe has a minimum UL rating of 1500 degrees Fahrenheit for half an hour – it typically takes firefighters ten minutes to put out a house fire, and a house fire normally burns with temperatures of up to 1500 degrees Fahrenheit.
SentrySafe is one of the most reputable brands of home safe. The SentrySafe range of Fire-Safe products offer excelling protection against fire, and the entry-level models have a UL rating of 1550 degrees Fahrenheit for half an hour. Most of the safes in the SentrySafe Fire-Safe range are also rated to protect digital media (such as CDs, DVDs, USB drives and memory sticks) against fire. There are also waterproof safes in the SentrySafe range of home safes.
Buying a home safe that can be bolted to the wall or to the floor is a good idea. This will prevent burglars from simply carrying the safe away to break into at their own convenience. It is recommended that you purchase a home safe with a capacity more than your current requirements, because you don’t know what items that you will want to secure in the future.
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