The hundreds of homes recently destroyed by the big fire in Spokane gave Northwest Safe the opportunity to treat the event as a real-world test. Not just which safes are best, but where to put the in your home, how to add additional protection, and where your most valuable items should be in the safe. Good stuff:
Via email from Rolf.
A year or two I spent some time looking at safe manufacturer catalogs, and reading descriptions and ratings and what they mean. There’s some surprising stuff out there.
Underwriter Labs has ratings for fire resistance, and for burglar resistance. They are clearly defined; they are also quite rigorous. The fire test specs are interesting to read. They involve not just heating the safe, but dropping it onto a concrete floor to simulate the building collapsing. And the test is an internal temperature limit requirement for the duration of the test — not just while the flames are going but for the cool-down period afterwards. That covers heat soaking through the safe walls.
I’ve also seen fire resistance specifications that are made up by the manufacturer. They look somewhat like the UL specs at first glance, but are more lenient if you carefully read between the lines. For example, they may stop monitoring internal temperature the moment the flame is turned off. Or they may omit the drop test. That doesn’t make them meaningless — but it does mean a UL 2 hour specification and an Acme Safe 2 hour specification are not the same thing. How close? Hard to say without a degree in heat transfer dynamics.
UL also has specs on burglar resistance. A bunch of gun “safes” have no UL rating at all. By UL standards they are merely locked boxes, not safes. The spec might be “TL30” which means the safe door resists expert attack with tools (I think that includes power tools, like drills or possibly abrasive cutters) for 30 minutes. Interestingly enough, that’s the door only. You might also see “TL30x6” — which means 30 minute resistance of all 6 sides, a much more stringent standard and one that raises the cost of the safe significantly.
I vaguely remember that safe fire ratings are defined with respect to protecting paper, so temperature limits are tied to what paper can tolerate. A 2 hour safe will protect your documents that long, but not your backup disk. I also even more vaguely remember a comment that fire safes may produce water vapor inside during a fire, which some things you might put in them might not appreciate. No idea if that’s accurate.
The fire/heat resistance is typically achieved by lining the inside with drywall. When heated, it emits water vapor. If not protected by a case or special sock, metal will rapidly rust as soon as the temperature starts dropping.
Watch the video for more details.