How
do you know if a gun safe has good fire protection?
Unfortunately,
the gun safe industry has not developed any real standards
for fire protection design. There are several reasons for
this shortcoming. The gold standard for fire safe testing
is Underwriters Laboratories. This is not done in the gun
safe industry for two major reasons:
- It
is too expensive. Most gun safe manufacturers don't have
the volume of sales and production to support the cost.
- U.L.'s
standards are much higher than most of the designs on
the market can pass. Therefore, many of the safes that
have the fire test labels have chosen to go to other testing
facilities with much less stringent testing standards
than U.L..
Most
manufacturers treat fire protection as an add-on, designing
systems which are put in the safe after it is already built.
The problem with this type design is that the fire package
is inserted through the door and put in place after the
safe is completed. This makes it impossible to completely
fill all the cavities especially in and around the door
where protection is most needed. Many manufacturers have
several options in their fire packages, but most just involve
adding more layers of fire-roc to the inside without really
improving the shortfalls in design of their more basic packages.
Most of the manufacturers do put nicer paint and trim packages
on the safes with the "higher" fire ratings.
It
should be mentioned that there is a U.L. label used by many
safe manufacturers. This is the Residential Security Container
label. This is not a fire test label. In fact, it has nothing
at all to do with fire protection. It is based on testing
which represents a very rudimentary burglary attempt with
common garage tools for a period of only five minutes.
