Safe Cash Ratings – Safe Fire Ratings – Burglary Ratings and Protections

What are the Different Safe Ratings that You Need to Know Prior to Buying a Safe

When buying any product, you want to make sure you fully experience your money’s worth. You don’t want to end up with an item that breaks down easily, or is only useful for a short time. This is especially true when buying a safe. Because it is often a lifetime investment, you want to ensure it does what it is supposed to, which is to keep your valuables safe from burglars and natural disasters.

To help you find the most suitable safe for your needs, reliable safe brands provide various ratings. These ratings indicate the capabilities of the safe against fire and burglary and help you find out how much insurance you may be entitled to. At Buy A Safe, our safes come with Safe Cash Ratings, Safe Fire Ratings, and Burglary Ratings, that guarantee the best quality products you can find in the market today.

SAFE CASH RATINGS

Burglary-resistant safes are tested and rated by the amount of time an intruder takes to break into a safe. Cash ratings will then be provided, ranging from $5,000 to $500,000 in the absence of a monitored alarm. With a monitored alarm, the cash rating may be doubled, depending on your insurance policy. Typically, insurance companies will cash rate a safe based on:

• Materials used to manufacture the safe and the thickness of its walls, door & body
• Barrier materials filling the walls, body & door of the safe
• The type and number of locks on the safe door
• The quality of the safe’s door locking mechanism
• Re-locking devices preventing forced entry

A high-quality burglar-resistant safe will have a certification on the inside of the door. These certification tests are carried out by independent accredited institutes where the safes undergo rigid testing to certify them for a certain level of burglary resistance. Grades start at 0 and climb to VI for safes and XIII for vaults. The grading system is particularly important for insurance reasons since the contents of the safe will only be insured for the correct value if the safe carries the appropriate grade. The higher the score, the higher the level of resistance, the higher the cash rating.

SAFE FIRE RATINGS

Fire ratings are given to safes to indicate the degree of protection it will provide its contents when exposed to extreme heat or fire. Fire-safe ratings can be based on specific periods the product will withstand a fire. This may be 30mins, 1 hour, 2 hours, 3 hours, and 4 hours. High-quality fire-resistant safes will have a certification plate affixed to the inside of the door, showing the level of fire protection the safe or cabinet will provide if exposed to intense heat and fire.

Safes sold by reliable brands will have been tested by world-class fire rating laboratories. These laboratories undertake various testing methods to test the safe. These tests typically include a Fire Endurance test, Fire Impact or Drop test, and Explosion Hazard test.

For fire protection, these standards vary depending on the items you’d like to protect. This is because the temperature at which objects deteriorate varies. For example, data media typically deteriorates at 52°C, while paper documents require protection from temperatures higher than 177°C.

BURGLARY RATINGS and PROTECTIONS

Safe burglary ratings indicate the degree of protection a safe will provide against an attempted burglary attack. The most common burglary ratings range from B-Rate to C-Rate. A high-quality burglar-resistant safe will have a certification plate on the inside of the door. This shows that the product has been tested to industry standards. It will also indicate the appropriate rating level of the product based on the difficulty it presents to an intruder in opening the safe.

Tests to determine a safe’s burglary rating are conducted by an accredited institute. A combination of factors is taken into consideration during testing. This includes the materials and security incorporated in the safe’s construction, size, power of the attack tools used, the time, and methods and skill of the technician breaking into the safe. The technicians conducting the tests are experienced safe engineers who are armed with an assortment of modern-day power tools. They use high-speed grinders & drills, oxy-acetylene, crowbars & sledgehammers, and other powerful cutting equipment.

If you want to learn more about safe ratings or find the appropriate safe for the items you’d like to protect, call Buy A Safe today on 1300 405 200. We offer Australia's largest range of online Safes & Vaults coming from the most trusted safe brands in the world today.