Safes for Storage of Money, Gold, Diamonds and Documents

Introduction – This is a brief discussion on safes with the intent being to store cash, bonds, bearer shares, bearer CD’s, bearer bonds, gold, precious stones and the like. This is not intended for commercial use.

Types of Protection – Safes offer basically three types of protection against fire, burglary and explosives. Explosives are a tool used to affect a burglary but they are very different from torches, drills, saws, crowbars, hammers, axes and other conventional safe burglary tools.

Fire Protection – You want your safe to have at least one hour of UL rated fire protection. For the fire protection the safe door must be adjusted to fit the frame of the safe tightly so as to make a good seal. If the safe has holes used to bolt the safe down or into walls then the fire protection will be greatly compromised. The safe will also be prone to leak water if there are sprinklers or water hoses being used to put out the fire.

The safe should also be located in premises with adequate fire alarms that will cause a reliable fire department to arrive promptly and put out the fire. If this is not possible then go for two hour UL rated fire protection. The fire protection may be greatly diminished after the building has been burning for two hours. Safes referred to as fire safes (only) are not effective against burglary. They are not to be used for anything valuable. They can be opened with fire axes, drills, crowbars, concrete saws, etc. Stay away.

Burglar Resistant Safes – Always get a UL approved safe or its foreign equivalent. Go for a 15-minute or longer UL rated safe. The testers give the people doing the test the blueprints for the safe. They assemble their tools under ideal conditions and start attacking the safe. They stop the clock if the drill bits need changing etc. They test safes on four sides and six, only buy safes tested on six sides. Make sure the safe is torch resistant as well as burglar tool resistant. Most jewelers buy safes that are 30 minute resistant.

The response time if an alarm is being used can be close, if you only have a 15 minute rated safe and the insurance companies know this so they make the jewelers get a higher rated safe. The highest rating is 60 minutes for tools and explosives. Sixty minute rated safes can be very heavy and require a crane to install so they do not crush the flooring when moving them around into place. You could put one in a garage on a concrete floor.

Many condos will not have elevators that can handle such a load. In that case the door could be removed to lighten the load. For most people a 30-minute safe is sufficient without explosives rating. Any 30-minute safe is going to take a decent blast to get open. They have to risk a lot using an explosive. They can kill themselves easily. They cannot use enough explosives and render the safe inoperable. Safes have strike plates that break if one attempts to drill them and a good blast would probably break the striker plate. This would cause pins to move in place and render the safe door inoperable. This makes opening the safe much more difficult.

Explosives can cause a safe to go flying across a room, even through a wall into another room or through a floor to the level below. The explosive can blow out windows, roofs, doors, cause fires; make alarms in nearby buildings go off, trigger car alarms etc. I did see a film where a safe was filled with water and a small hole put in the safe (think high speed diamond bit drills and a lot of time plus the drill bit is 10 inches long and the drill itself weighs 25 pounds). The small hole allowed an explosive to be put in the safe and when detonated blew the door off the safe. This was done in a movie with Robert De Niro and also was performed for real on a tape. It worked. What was not told was the quality of the safe. I doubt a 60-minute safe would blow out like this. There are numerous bolts all around the door that would not give.

Anyway thought this was worth mentioning even though it is very unlikely to ever be encountered in the real world. If it bothers you make sure there are no working water hoses in the area of the safe. There are also laser torches (lances) that can cut into most any safe. They are very costly and large items to move around. They cause fire and smoke triggering smoke alarms. The light from them is also very prominent and at night so neighbors will notice it through windows even with drapes. The chances of you getting robbed by one using explosives or a lance are remote but we will cover methods to secure the safe that will protect against this too.

Plate Safes – In some countries just hard steel plates are welded together to form a box and a safe door is put on. They have no water or fire resistance. Stay away from these since they have no fire protection. These are often used as cash drop boxes for retail outlets and banks not designed for more than $25,000 at a time. They are reasonably burglar resistant but we need better protection for protecting substantial assets.

Gun Safes – Stay away unless they have a UL rating of 15 minutes or higher which 98% of them do not have. There are one or two being made that have a 15-minute rating and one with a 30 minutes rating. Generally the Fort Knox Gun safes are the best and they do have a 15-minute rated model. They have striker plates; relockers etc but the regular ones are just gun safes.

A gun safe has a UL 5 minute rating as a home security container. They are good for protecting against drug addict burglars with no tools or knowledge. For anything over $50,000 in value never use a gun safe unless it is UL rated for at least 15 minutes. If you are using a regular gun safe it can be a good decoy safe and never keep anything really valuable in it. Let it be found easily while the real safe should be well hidden. There are plain fire safes that are built to look like fire safes. These are not serious safes and should be avoided altogether.

Fire Safes – Fire protection only safes should never be used. They are very easy to open only requiring the simplest of tools. They would even make a poor decoy safe they are so easily opened. Avoid.

Safe Locks – There are two types: push button digital and turn the dial manual. Manual dials should be avoided. They are easily defeated. There are some very sophisticated ones that are good but digital is better.

There are safe dialers. They are laptop computers that hook up to a safe manual dialer and try all the combinations. They take about 3 days to open a safe. Not good for you. There are also x-ray type machines that can look into the safe and can see the dial and the grooves on the dials and thus get the combination that way. Then there are x-ray proof dials made out of plastic that defeat the x-ray attack. Then there are dial locks that have a digital display. Not sure what they are categorically but they are hard to find and very costly ($1300). A good digital lock is fine.

Do not use the Sergeant and Greenleaf entry-level locks. Always use an upgrade level lock that costs more. Most of the safes come with low-level digital locks, always upgrade. They have more combination possibilities and are harder to defeat. The good ones no longer use batteries; one just spins a dial to charge them up.

It is easy to reset a digital lock yourself. Resetting a combination lock requires a locksmith and then he knows what the new combination is. With digital locks only you know the combination. After three to five bad attempts in a five-minute period the lock shuts down for 15 minutes or longer. This makes cracking the combination very difficult. You can also have master codes, codes for certain people that require the master code to be set first and other possibilities including logs of who opened the safe and when. So go digital but always upgrade form the cheapest model.

Fortifying the safe – There are a few easy ways to fortify your safe. We will cover some of these.

Safe Room – What is done here is a solid closet is used as a safe room. You can take the closet door and put on a solid core wood door. Put the hinges on the inside. Next install a good deadbolt lock. This is going to slow down the burglar some. If there is an alarm company that would have already been notified the extra door to get through is not going to comforting. Inside the closet you can pile clothes, books, etc. around the real safe making it hard to see. Out in plain sight you can leave a real safe, small one is better.

Thus the burglar may think the locked closet was to protect the small safe and then he can attack it and waste valuable time. The police will be rolling and that can be life or death for the burglar. Anything you do to make them waste time is in your favor. Take a few random closets around the house and do the same with solid core wood doors and deadbolts. There is a good chance they will break into the wrong closet(s) and waste time. Even without an alarm company that calls the police in place the burglars will be in a serious hurry.

Safe Surrounded by Concrete – This can be built inside a safe room for more security since no one would see it and wonder what it was you were trying to protect so well. The idea is you build a four to five inch thick wall around the safe, only leaving the safe door exposed. The safe door is the hardest part to get through. The concrete should be drill and saw resistant concrete. Putting in rebar is certainly a nice thought too. Make sure you do the back of the safe, and the sides and the roof of the safe. Build a nice substantial concrete lip in the front of the safe to prevent it from be dragged out from inside its concrete covering. Maybe construct an upper lip from the ceiling of the safe even if it is only to have a few pieces of rebar down in front of the safe to stop it from be removed from the concrete.

Anyone wanting to get into your safe would now have to go through the door, which is the thickest and most secure part of the safe. The other choice would be to attack the hard concrete with rebar, which is a real long tedious job. Would probably require a sledgehammer and a few hours work and then they have to first get into the safe. The concrete also helps with fire and water. If you wondering you build a frame out of wood to hold the concrete and rebar in place until it hardens. You could take a 15-minute rated safe and make it very hard to get into this way. You also harden the safe against explosives too. Try blowing up a five-inch concrete wall made out of hard concrete with rebar. Not easy and then you first have to attack the safe.

The more extreme way of doing this is to take an area of the garage and construct a room for the safe out of concrete. You could use cinder blocks filled with concrete and rebar. Would not be as hard but still very hard to get through. What you should do is buy a vault door with a combination lock and a solid frame. You will probably need to get the measurements from the safe reseller and need to know what you are doing or else get professional help with the vault door and frame. A good vault door can be 750 pounds or more. You can ignore the fire aspects and just get a solid 3/8 inch or ½ inch thick steel vault door with numerous bolts going into the heavy steel frame embedded in the hardened concrete.

A digital safe lock (upgraded model of course) is best. Avoid just a keyed lock. Digital and a sophisticated keyed lock is fine. This would be a major nightmare to get through. The cinder block method would be easier to construct. If the goal is to create time-consuming obstacles so the police can respond to the alarm, this is very effective. In any case it keeps the safe out of site and enhances the security.

You can put a wood door over the vault door to disguise what it is. If there is no alarm and no police are going to respond if you are not home then you have to take more pains to harden the vault. If you live in a very rural area police response times can be 30-45 minutes, which is almost like having no police response at all. Buying a 10-inch thick vault door is overkill if you have a five-inch thick concrete walled room. They will go through the walls quicker that try to get through a 3/8 inch hard steel vault door, same for a 10-inch thick vault door.

If one was going to store millions of dollars in cash or gold inside the setup they might want to go for a 10 inch thick vault door especially if the police response times were going to be long or non-existent. Make the room with two sets of walls. In between the walls insert ¼ inch steel plates, even 1/8 inch thick steel plates will be a big pain to get through. Now they break through the first wall and hit the steel plate. Very discouraging. A concrete room with vault door in the garage can even take the place of the safe itself, especially if you double wall it with steel plates on all sides even the roof and use a serious vault door.

Securing the House – One of the best ways to get the house secure is to get a hurricane resistant garage door that locks from inside. These doors are very strong. Regular garage doors are not strong and can be pulled off easily. The hurricane resistant doors are designed to not be easily pulled off. Rig up a way of bolting the garage door closed form the inside. Make the garage door a time consuming obstacle.

Next get hurricane proof doors and windows all around the house. You can always add in some crash resistant 3M film on the windows to make them extremely break proof. Put two locks on each external door. For serious security get high security locks and have the locksmith install one of the locks upside down. This makes picking the lock extremely difficult, if not impossible for any but a very seasoned professional locksmith who knows and understands that lock. Use good locks on the windows. This will keep you safe from most home invasions and your safe too.

Alarms – These can be good. If there is an attempted break-in and they gained entry while you are not home trouble can ensue, especially in the USA. The police will respond to the alarm and enter and search the house. They will correctly try to see if there are any thieves hiding in the house. They will also look for things like guns, drugs, drug paraphernalia and anything else they could arrest one for. Make sure all guns are secured under lock and key. If they find the guns in plain site they will radio in the serial numbers to see if they are stolen. Now any unregistered guns are registered, See how they work.

Ok back to the alarm. You cannot rely on the phone lines you need a cell phone or radio backup- for the phone to call the alarm company in event of a break-in. You wire the windows and doors. Put in motion detectors for when you are not home. You can wire the door for the room to the safe. You can get a mercury motion switch put on the safe. You can wire the safe door. The alarm is good in that it signals the company who sends the police. If there is a partial break in the police may ask you to open the safe for them. This is silly and you should refuse and call for the supervisor or watch commander. You complain about this. Refuse and say you are going to call your lawyer. Ask him to get a search warrant.

Remember that it will cost them a lot of money to force your safe open. Do they have the budget for this? What if your lawyer sues them and they have to pay to restore it? See how this works. To get a locksmith to get through a serious setup might cost them airfare and five thousand to ten thousand dollars. The local guys often are not competent enough unless you live in a major city. It would require a few days to set up and execute. During this time your lawyer can be filing motions to have it stopped which you may very well win. Just being a burglary victim is probable cause for nothing. So you get an order to stop the search after they spent thousands of dollars to pay for an expert safe-cracker/locksmith. Not something they are likely to want to do unless they had a whole lot to go on.

Being a victim means nothing in terms of probable cause. Alarms can be a good deterrent if you use them all the time. The way they a re defeated is usually a thief comes into the house impersonating a workman of some sort-cable, telephone, plumber etc. They sneak around and disable an alarm switch. Then they can come back that night and enter by the area with the disabled switch before the alarm company can come out and make a repair. Having switches on doors, windows and motion detectors makes this more difficult. For them to do. They would have to disable a few switches or the whole system. Make sure there is a battery backup good for a day at least. An alarm is just another layer in your security plan. No one layer by itself should be relied on.

Dogs – These can be helpful but again just another layer. They are great for an early warning alarm system. They are easily defeated. They can be poisoned which is common in this part of the world, so keep them inside the house when not supervised. They can be shot with a taser and disabled. A pitchfork will dispatch them easily. They can be shot with pepper spray. Two or three dogs together greatly amplify the threat to an intruder. It is very hard to even shoot three dogs charging you in the dark in a strange home. An alarm system will require disabling the motion detectors when the dogs are in the house. Dogs 80 pounds or more are best for deterrent value. It takes a dog of this size to knock a man down quickly. The breed isn’t that important as long as there are three of them they will get into a pack mentality and attack even a dinosaur as a pack. It gets their confidence up a lot when they are running in a pack, even a small pack. Three angry dogs rushing you in the dark is very scary even to a hardened soldier.

Closing Thoughts - Be as secretive as possible as to this set-up. The fewer people who know about it the better. Try to keep it out of plain site. Try getting the safe or vault door from a few hundred miles away on the Internet. Locksmiths are often moonlighting police or reserve police. No reason to have them know about your setup. If things hit the fan which is likely if not probable in North America they can go rogue. If the safe or vault door was bought from a few hundred miles away they will not be bothering you if things get bad, they will focus on the local targets.

Always use digital locks. Read the instructions and reset them yourself. Dial locks man the locksmith has the combination, not good. They save these. If something happens they charge you big money to open your safe. They can also charge the authorities big money for nothing if they have the combination. Do not trust these guys. The government will give these locksmiths way more business than you so that is where their loyalty truly lies. Breaking into a sophisticated safe normally involves drilling a small hole in the door to manipulate the safe from inside the door. Usually they are working some hours. Two hours would be extremely fast and might be enough time for a UL 15 safe if the safecracker knew the model well. Six to twelve hours would be more like it. Sometimes takes days. Sometimes they fail and another guy needs to be brought in. The safe is left with this hole. Even if you weld, it is never the same again.

Don’t lock yourself out. There are not a lot of people around who can open a UL 30 rated safe and those that can charge a lot. Usually airfare is involved. A UL 60 minute safe makes it even harder and more expensive. A more obscure brand of safe for the region makes it even harder to find a locksmith familiar with the brand and model. Pay attention to the little things.