My collection is officially out of control, it has becoome a serious amount of $ in mostly pre33 US gold. The back of my sock drawer is clearly not sufficient.. I would prefer to keep them at home, because I like to look at my coins, and so I don't want to use a safe deposit box. I am thinking about purchasing an Amsec UL series fire safe, good for 2 hours at 1850 degrees (suppposedly keeps the inside below 350 degrees). But I've been told that they are only good for protecting paper, not coins. I know that gold melts at over 1900 degrees, but the plastic PCGS and NGC slabs will melt much sooner (perhaps at 350?). What do you use for your coin storage? What are your opinions on useing a fire safe for coin storage? Thank you!
Fire safes are fine, so long as you remember that they are designed to protect paper contents through high humidity in the case of fire, so use of adequate amounts of desiccant is an absolute necessity!
Here are some things to consider. First of all if your sock drawer was filled with dirty socks, no crook would go in there. If you put them on a table right in plain site, crooks would think they are just toy money and possibly leave alone. Glue them to a sheet of cardboard, add to a picture frame and hang in your home.:goofer: As to safes. Note they are rated for fire protection. Most are water, air, fire, smoke protected. Most are very heavy and filled with coins are not an easy item to remove by criminals. Note that anyone seeing a safe would think you have a substantial amount of money available so you would have to find a hinding place for the safe and if large, not easy. Remember that a safe will keep the same air in that was there when the thing was opened. So you would have to constantly add a air, moisture, etc protector such as the silica gels everyone raves about. The really worse thing is although a safe is fire retardant, they are not heat proof after a certain amount of time. What this means is in case of a fire, the safe would get hot, although slower than a couch, but still get hot. The longer the fire the hoter it gets. This is true of the inside as well. The safe retards heat to a point and then becomes a furnace to a point. Now if you have anything in there in the way of plastic and a fire hits, you'll have liquid plastic in minutes all over your coins. If you have coins touching each other, they could possibly fuse together from intense contant heat. If you have cardboard, paper, wood, etc in the safe with your coins, that too would help create a mess as the heat rises. Some people put coins in a safe with guns and ammunition. Imagine what happens at about a few hundred degrees there. Safes are good but also could be the end of your collection. One neighbor had a large Gold coin collection in a safe in his house. Way to much bragging for our area. He ended up in the hospital, safe blown open, coins gone. Another friend had a safe. Went on vacation. While gone moving truck pulled up, took his safe, they told nosey neighbors that this family was moving, safe now gone. Every thing is relative.
I have a nice INKA safe that is fire retardant and bolted to the concrete and weighs 800 lbs. I do not have any desiccant or silica gels. Can anyone recommend a particular brand or vendor?
At what moisture level would silica packs be recommended? Where I live, the average relative humitidy is in the single digits most of the year, and near 0 in the house because of the ac. Guy~
I plan on buying a ton. I'm worried about my collection since we moved to a more humid part of the state. It's probably my mind playing tricks on me, but I think they've already been affected.
