Guide to Purchasing Fire Safes

When Choosing your Fire Safes you should consider the following:

The Location

In general terms ground floor is best as the safe won’t suffer from an impact should the floor collapse in a fire, however our certified fire safes go through a drop test as part of their certification, so this shouldn’t be an issue.

Type and Level of Protection

There are two types of fire protection, for Paper and Computer Media.

Safes/cabinets are tested for 30, 60, 90 or 120 minutes within a controlled environment and are subject to a variety of tests, such as Fire & Impact, Explosion etc.

There are two testing levels, one for Paper and one for Media protection. This is because the temperatures at which data media (e.g 52 C) and documents (e.g 177 C) deteriorate differs.

We Stock safes/cabinets that comply with European or American testing standards. These standards would include the VDMA (German), UL (USA), and NT (Swedish) Fire Test.

Data Protection Products 

The minimum industry standard for data protection is a product with a 1 hour VDMA certificate.

Some  insurance companies now require the higher 2 hour VDMA 24991 certificate S 120 DIS.

The modern, VDMA passed products have been designed to protect data during the “soak out” period that any cabinet will expose data to in a fire.  A data cabinet by its very construction will store a large amount of heat from a fire. This stored energy will continue to heat the cabinet's interior and contents long after the fire has been extinguished.  Typically the interior temperature of a data cabinet will peak 6 to 8 hours after a fire has been extinguished.  The VDMA test monitors the internal temperatures of the data cabinet until full cooling has occurred.

Magnetic media must be kept below 55º C or complete and total data corruption will occur.

The older, now obsolete, test standards stop recording the temperature inside the cabinet at the end of the fire test heating period.  For example, a 1 hour rated cabinet with an older test certificate is removed from the kiln at the end of the 1 hour heating period, then all temperature measurement ceases and the cabinet is rapidly cooled with water. The test data media and measuring instruments are then removed. This is not comparable with the events of a real fire.

The VDMA test monitors the internal temperatures of the data cabinet until complete and full cooling has occurred.  This ensures that a cabinet with a modern VDMA certificate actually protects your data for stated time of heating in a fire and does not then let you down during the subsequent soak out period.

A cabinet will be left untouched in a fired building until the fire brigade have completed the extinguishing, making safe and investigation of the fire.  This time delay before you have access to your cabinet and its contents must be taken into account. It is therefore paramount that any data cabinet purchased have the minimum 1 hour VDMA rating. Anything less is false economy.

Paper Protection Products 

When considering a paper protection product the same rules always apply if anywhere near complete protection is required, i.e. VDMA - S60 P and S120 P certificates.

Paper is quite robust when compared to data as it will withstand 170º C before gradual discolouration. If discolouration of the documents is acceptable then products with the Swedish National Testing Institute's (Nordtest)  NT 017 FIRE - 60 P and 120 P  certificates offer good paper protection.

The Type of Locking

You have two basic Options Key locking or Electronic Digital key Pad.

The choice is very much a personal one, and because Crothers only stock high quality products with long track records both are equally secure and reliable.

In the event of a fire obviously the electronic key pad will be destroyed however the safe can still be opened by a highly trained Crothers technician.

For further details on any of the above or for answers to any questions you may have please contact, Martin Crothers phone 01 456 7947 or visit one of our security superstores.