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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Publius2, post: 7864479, member: 105571&quot;]I&#039;ve actually given that quite a bit of thought.&nbsp; If you&#039;re going to keep a valuable collection at home, your security and loss limitation hazards (for most people) in order of decreasing risk are:</p><p><br /></p><p>1)&nbsp; Theft</p><p>2)&nbsp; Fire</p><p>3)&nbsp; Flood</p><p><br /></p><p>I&#039;ll ignore flood since water is nowhere near the hazard that items 1 and 2 are.&nbsp; So, theft:&nbsp; Buy a burglar-rated safe and choose the highest rating that you can justify.&nbsp; Any safe that is not burglar-rated is not worth the money.&nbsp; Then spend a significant amount of thought on how you are going to hide and secure the safe.&nbsp; You must make it as difficult as possible for the safe to be stolen.&nbsp; Yes, thieves will steal the whole safe and take their time opening it at their evil lair.&nbsp; I am reminded of the story of the burglars who backed up a tow truck to the house, ran the cables inside and dragged the safe outside, in broad daylight in a subdivision.</p><p><br /></p><p>Where you locate the safe is dependent upon how you will hide it and secure it but also upon what happens in the event of a fire.&nbsp; Fire-rated safes are available and they are rated upon a UL testing criteria.&nbsp; IIRC, it is the time to a 400F interior temperature in fires of 1500F and 2000F temperatures.&nbsp; Obviously, longer and hotter is better (and more expensive).</p><p><br /></p><p>But what happens to the temperature of your safe is also dependent upon where in the structure it is located.&nbsp; If it&#039;s on the interior of the house, then when the ceiling, walls, furnishings and roof collapse upon it, all those flammable materials create a huge and long-lasting bed of fuel that will not allow plastic and paper materials inside the safe to survive.&nbsp; Better to have the safe on an exterior wall, obviously on the ground floor, in order to reduce the &quot;coking bed&quot; effect.</p><p><br /></p><p>Finally, and I&#039;ve never seen anyone give voice to this idea, you might consider a heat suppression system.&nbsp; I&#039;m not talking about a fire-suppression system which usually consists of a wet or dry sprinkler system for the house.&nbsp; Instead, I&#039;m talking about an inlet and outlet pipe connected to the safe for carrying cooling water into and out of the safe in the event the interior temperature reaches some set temperature, say 200F.&nbsp; The water won&#039;t really do any damage and if you construct the system from a fire and structurally damage-resistant piping like Sch. 80 or 120 welded stainless steel, then there are all kinds of advantages, including additional resistance to burglars carting away your entire safe.&nbsp; Obviously this is a ground floor option only.</p><p><br /></p><p>I have to be careful here because my engineer&#039;s hat comes on and I want to design the whole thing once I begin thinking about it but that&#039;s the basic outline.</p><p><br /></p><p>Frankly, it seems to me that most folks are simply not willing to spend any real thought or money to protect their collection, like the poor gentleman in NJ who posted recently on the loss of a huge collection.&nbsp; Sometimes and for some people, the best solution is a safety deposit box at the bank.</p><p><br /></p><p>OTOH, my local hardware store that opened in 1884 still has a huge safe that must weigh over a ton AND IT&#039;S ON WHEELS.&nbsp; I wonder if they&#039;d consider selling?[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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