Choosing the right home safe can be a daunting experience, with 1000’s of different products on the market, ranging from £40 to in excess of £50,000, you really do have to sit down first and work out what it is that you need from the safe.
Here at Macclesfield Lock and Safe we supply and also install a wide variety of safes, so we thought we’d put together a handy guide to help you choose the perfect safe for you.
1. CASH/JEWELLERY RATING: The first thing to consider is what cash rating you require from the safe, all insurance approved safes have to have a minimum of a £1000 cash rating. The cash rating is relatively self explanatory, but you may not know that whatever cash rating a safe has, the jewellery rating is automatically 10x that value, for example, a £1000 cash rated safe is insured for £10,000 worth of jewellery, and a £4000 cash rated safe is insured for £40,000 worth of jewellery, and so on. Once you’ve established the cash rating you require, this will significantly reduce the number of products you need to look at.
2. SIZE: What size do you need your safe to be; obviously this is determined by what you want to keep in the safe. The main things to consider are if you are planning on keeping just cash, jewellery, passports etc in the safe, or do you have A4 files, pictures and family heirlooms that mean you require one of the bigger safes.
3. POSITION OF INSTALLATION: One of the most important things to consider is where are you going to install the safe? This is obviously dependant on point 3, as size is important! Insurance companies require the safe to be fitted to a solid surface, so you either need to fix to an outer wall (not an internal stud wall), a solid floor, or find the joist in the floor. Some safes only come with floor fixing positions, whilst others have fixing points on the bottom and rear, make sure you check this before you buy.
4. FIRE PROTECTION: Again this is fairly self explanatory, but you need to determine if you require fire protection from your safe. If you do choose a fire rated safe then this significantly increases the cost of the safe. Things that you may want to consider is the position of your safe, for example, if you are putting the safe in your loft then you may take the calculated risk that any house fire would likely be put out before the flames reached your loft, alternatively if the safe is been installed in your kitchen, then a fire rated safe is the most sensible decision.
Once all the above points have been considered you will be ready to buy the perfect safe for your needs, please feel free to call us on 01625 616711 with any questions you might have. Macclesfield Lock and Safe have trade accounts with all of the leading safe suppliers in the UK, and with an experienced team of locksmiths we are happy to come and professionally install your safe.
