How to Understand Safe Fire Rating Claims
If you take a look at all the gun safes available on the market, you will see a lot of claims of fire ratings claiming 60-120 minutes. Anyone can slap a sticker on a cheaply made safe and claim it will protect whatever you place inside of it from burning up in a fire. While chances are that most people will never experience a fire in their home, are you willing to gamble with your family’s safety and comfort in case your home does catch fire? Here are a few things you should know about fire ratings and how they pertain to actual safe fire protection.
Higher Temperature Ratings
When shopping for a gun safe, you might see claims that a safe is rated to up to 1400 degrees. You might think this safe is superior to a Liberty safe because ours are rated up to 1200 degrees.
That is exactly what some of those safe manufacturers want you to think.
But what you probably don’t know is manufacturer fire claims are not regulated. So you might think you are buying a better safe, only to be shocked and dismayed later if a fire occurs.
Testing Games Manufactures Play
Many gun safe manufacturers will go through the process of furnace-testing their safes. Methods for this testing are sometimes questionable. At Liberty Safe, we ramp the furnace up to 1200 degrees in just ten minutes; other manufacturers may do a 20- to 30-minute ramp up. They do this to try to influence the length of time that the safe lasted in the furnace at 1200 degrees.
Liberty does not play games when it comes to furnace-testing our safes. Instead, we rely on the proven science and results from research on house fires performed by the U.S. Department of Commerce.
What Makes a Gun Safe Most Fire Resistant?
Superior safe fire protection truly relies on how well the safe is built. Liberty knows that there is no room for cutting corners to produce a gun safe that can take the heat of fire and still protect your firearms and your family’s valued possessions.
We focus on three main ingredients for better safe fire protection:
- Expandable Palusol® door seals that keep fire, heat and smoke out
- Multiple layers of UL fire-rated sheetrock
- Thick steel walls that withstand the intense heat
When it comes to safe fire protection, Liberty Safe stands above the rest. Our Presidential gun safe provides a whopping 2.5 hours of fire protection. But just don’t take our word for it. We have more real-life testimonials of safes surviving actual fires than other manufacturers.