Originally Posted by jdh
It was buried under the collapsed burning house for 3+ days. There is not a safe on the market that would have saved the contents.
Check out some of the history behind the Great Chicago Fire in 1871. Many high quality safes survived the incredibly hot raging infernos which consisted of high density wood structures completely burnt down and safes buried in piles of hot ashes for days. That's probably very similar to the intensity of a raging forest fire. They protected their contents. That was done with technology that had been around for 200 years. The technology was old in 1871.
Diebold claims all 878 recovered Diebold safes from the fire had contents survive intact.
It can obviously still be done today but no one does due to modern response times of firefighting. The longest I've seen is a 4-hour UL Class 150 for a large Schwab media safe. That'll keep your contents under 150F for four hours. I've got my important media like hard drives, disks, SD cards, and thumb drives stored in a UL UL 72 Class 125 safe that keeps things under 125F in a fire. These types of items won't survive in the 350F temperatures seen inside a normal fire safe.
Sheetrock isn't used in any UL-approved fire safe. Only gun safes. At least you got a free replacement. I'm curious if most other gun safe companies would be just as responsive in the same situation.
Originally Posted by helotaxi
Sturdy Safe would have done considerably better than the Cannon.
Unless you had one side-by side at the same time in the same fire, that's a baseless claim. No UL-approved fire safe uses ceramic wool for fire protection either so using Sturdy to bash the Cannon is like the pot calling the kettle black. Gun safe companies won't use modern fire barriers because their products would simply become too heavy, expensive, and not feasible to sell to the general homeowner.
First, fire safes can moisture into the contents by design to prevent paper products from charring, turning your gun safe into a 350F sauna rust-o-rama. To solve this, you'd have to build a gun safe the same way they build data safes to prevent humidity from ruining the contents, which is a fire safe within a sealed safe. Unfortunately, a safe large enough to store rifles will be 7 feet tall with 10" thick double-insulated walls and weighs in excess of 3,000lbs. Don't forget depth. With the 30" wide doorways in modern residential homes, a 30" deep safe will limit you to 10" of storage depth.
It's really asking the impossible to get UL-approved fire ratings in a safe that'll fit enough guns at a reasonable price, size, and weight. I don't expect my guns to survive a major fire. That's what insurance is for.
