Home safe must haves

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must haves"

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Must have the “stated” ability to hold 25 more guns than you currently have

My main recommendation would be to get the biggest one you can afford and move, the bigger ones are extremely heavy.
I got one last year that is advertised as a 30 gun, but unless I remove all the shelves it will only hold 9 long guns and that took some creative placement because of the scopes on 6 rifles. It has LED lights battery powered and dehumidifier but nothing else extra. I will probably eventually get a bigger one or a separate one for long guns and use this one for pistols and some other valuables.

Whatever size you think you need, you need bigger.

You need to do some homework to determine how big of a safe you need/want, and what fire/heat rating you want it to be. Obviously the higher the fire/heat rating the more expensive it will be.

I bought one last year, and the salesman explained it to me like this:
-AR style rifles are considered 2.5 guns in a safe
-Pump and automatic shotguns are considered 1 gun
-Rifle with a scope is 1.5 guns
-O/U shotguns are considered 1.5 or 2 guns

Meaning it will hold 36 pump or automatic shotguns, or rifles with no scopes, but pretty much any other style gun will cost you the space of an additional gun or two for each one.

Just got a 36 gun safe thinking it would be big enough. It isn’t

Get some gunsafe Rifle rods. You can buy on Amazon. They make storing long guns much easier. You can store more long guns with them.

While the quick access of an electronic lock is appealing I prefer a good S&G dial lock as it has no electronics to fail. In a perfect world, I'd like to have both but those are uncommon.

When looking at fire ratings remember that those are for a certain temperature limit and duration, it's not absolute. Consider where you plan to put your safe from a fire point of view. For example if it's going to be in the basement and your home is fully engulfed in a fire, the contents of the safe probably won't survive. Consider putting it next to an outside wall which, in a fire, would collapse and expose the safe to outside relatively lower temps. Finally on fire rating, consider how close you are to the nearest fire station.

Make sure you use some good lag bolts to secure the safe to the floor, otherwise it's easy for a thief to tip it over and take a grinder to the thinner back/side panels or just cart if off completely for those I've seen put their safe in the garage. If you have the space, and you're putting it next to an outside wall, put another partial wall on the other side of the safe so it's only exposed on the front and maybe top. Making a little cubby area for the safe.

Lastly, the line about "buying bigger than you need" gets a lot of play but I'm much more of an advocate for instead of getting one really big safe, get 2 or 3 (or more) mid-sized safes and put them in different locations to distribute your risk. Because if someone DID get into your one big safe they've got everything.

I bought big. 64 gun. Added leds, generic golden rod, bought shelves and brackets from Home Depot, wall dogs to screw in to drywall inside the safe, magnet strips for mags from harbor freight, rifle rods, and over and under shelf hand gun holders.

Not what you asked for, but my biggest lesson.

Safes are not waterproof. Duh. They would become a huge bomb in the event of a fire.

However, after 2016, what I learned was this.

That fire pocket for documents is indeed waterproof, until the top flap goes under. When your safe floods, it fills with water then holds the water until you come back and empty it.

Huge difference between documents getting wet and documents under water for 3 days.

If you store anywhere but inside your house (walkout/barn/etc) make sure you have a dehumidifier in that bad boy.