So I've never gotten a Fire Safe or RSC.  Just a large steel security box.  I've always read that if you have a house fire, in a stick build house, then even if you have your guns in a safe, that all the plastic is going to be melted and your guns probably won't be safe to shoot.  Is this so?  If it is, that is very discouraging.  I've seen the safes/RSC that are rated for so many minutes at so much temperature, but do these really protect your guns from any fire damage?

So far, I've gone the route of having insurance that covers the firearms in a fire and theft, as long as I have a monitored security system in place that also has reporting fire alarms.  I'd still not want to lose my guns even if they are insured though.  

Is the best option just to live in a metal building or dome type house made of concrete?  I've even thought about having a garage on a slab, and then having a vault room with walls of poured concrete and rebar, then putting on a security door, then a fire safe inside of that.   I really can find any good information on what is the best option here.

I depends where the safe is located.

If you have a basement, that's the coolest place in a house fire.... unless the home is fully consumed and it collapses into the basement... then your safe and everything you own will just melt into a big ball of shit.

Check you tube. Tons of safe tests done there but fire doesn't harm Guns at the bottom of the lake

If you get them out immediately after the fire they might be ok.

Get some black iron pipe and plum a sprinkler head over it if you want to be 100% sure.

I feel that safes are for theft protection, and where you put the safe is for fire protection. You can get some crazy fire protection without *that* much work.

http://www.usgdesignstudio.com/wall-selector.asp?fireRating=4

In addition to passive fire protection, you could use an NFPA 13D fire sprinkler system for some active goodness. I'm always paranoid about them leaking and causing water damage, but that's probably not really an issue. You could always sprinkler the rooms around the gun room for protection if you're as paranoid as I am. Also keep in mind that sprinklers aren't for property protection, they're for people protection. But it sure couldn't hurt.

http://www.nfpa.org/public-education/by-topic/fire-and-life-safety-equipment/home-fire-sprinklers

With fire protection, there are a couple of major questions: (1) is the fire rating meaningful?  (2) What will it do to your stuff?

On the first question, where does the fire rating come from?  Does it come from an independent testing lab, or just from the safe manufacturer?  If the latter, how did they determine it?  Many manufacturers' fire ratings are nothing more than their guess as to how long the safe would last; they've never done any lab testing to confirm that.

To the second question, the fire rating, if believed, generally means that with a specified outside temp, the interior temp won't exceed 350 F at the hottest point (i.e., at the top) for the specified length of time.  During that time, the safe interior will be saturated with steam--that's how the fire protection works.  Plastics, of course, won't be harmed by the steam at all.  Aluminum and stainless steel shouldn't be.  Blued steel could well be.

Actually no. Most manufacturers do indeed test their safes. However, what they do is stick the safe in a cold oven, then start heating. They start the clock as soon as the door is closed, in a cold oven. Then claim it went up to X degrees for X time.

A real UL rating will start from the time the oven is heated, until it reaches the specified temperature point for the specified time, then the safe is allowed to cool until opened. At no time, during the heating or cooling, may the safe exceed it's degree rating, which is typically 350 degrees (paper chars at ~400).

A proper safe, with a real UL350 rating, will not have gypsum board as the insulating material, therefore, in a real safe, steam will not be an issue. Now if you buy a cheap safe, with cheap gypsum insulation, yeah, you'll have that problem.



Overall, if you want a good fire rating, buy a UL fire rated safe. If you live in the boonies with the closet fire department being volunteer, and 20 minutes away, you will want a good fire rated safe. If you live in the city with the fire department a block down the road, fire rating won't matter as much.

What you buy, is very dependent on your situation.

It won't have gypsum board, but it will have a concrete mix or some other material that still controls the temperature by decomposing into steam and its other constituent parts, just as gypsum board does, so the contents will still be bathed in steam for some period of time.

And how many gun safes have a UL350 rating?  I recall seeing one or two, with five-figure price tags, but they're hardly the norm.

A proper safe will have a fully welded seam containing the cement, so no, steam will not enter the interior of the safe.

I know of multiple people on this site who have a UL350 safe, mine is.

Sorry, but that's not accurate at all. ALL UL Class 350 on the market use steam as the primary moderator of internal temperature. This is the state of the art, unchanged for over 120 years. If a safe were made to be perfectly air tight interior, then the contents would cook, even if it had good quality steam generating insulation surrounding the inner shell. It is impossible to seal and maintain internal temperatures below 350 degrees without the saturated steam preventing hot gasses from entering the safe. Sorry to be the voice of fact and reality, but that safe doesn't exist except with the UL Class 125/150 Data safes, which are a different animal and VERY expensive...

So if the entire interior of the safe is fully welded, keeping the cement mixture from entering it, and the door has a proper seal, how exactly would steam get into the interior? Is the pressure so great as to bust the inner shell?

Whatever is used to "Fireproof" the safe holds water.   When the temperature inside the safe reaches a certain point the water is boiled out and produces steam.    The act of boiling absorbs some heat and then the additional volume creates pressure.   The pressure keeps the hot gases from the fire outside of the safe.  

As I understand it, some of the cheaper fire proofing materials will shrink as the water is boiled out.   As the components shrink gaps in the protection will begin to appear.   At this point the fireproofing effectiveness breaks down very quickly and the temperature in the safe will climb.  

Also as I understand it, you would not want any part of the safe to be completely air tight in the event of a fire.   An air tight tight safe would eventually rupture and that would be dangerous.  

2Hut8

Yes, 2Hut8 is right, but it's more than that. The thing that many overlook is that heat transfer works in three distinct modes; Convection, Conduction and Radiation. In the safe under fire, these modes are all active and contribute significant energy to the safe interior. The biggest, and most influential energy path to the interior is the metal jambs and door frame. These materials are heated to full external temperatures on the outside, and conducting heat thru the door opening perimeter structure. This all releases energy inside the safe by convection and IR emission. If the steam is not circulated inside the safe and venting thru the jambs, this energy drives the internal ambient temperatures up very rapidly. These complementary energy transfer effects are happening over the entire safe body to a significant degree, where corners and edges get very hot and conduct energy thru to the inner walls.

In addition to all of that, door seals are never perfect. When you heat a steel body to temperatures well above 1000ºF, there is substantial thermal expansion of the structure. This expansion is not consistent, nor controlled. There is no resilient seal material that can cope with the active changing shape of the structure. The body can bulge as much as 3 inches on the sides, same with the door face. Intumescent seals can expand quite a lot, but they are brittle and fragile once they expand, and they crumble easily with mechanical changes in the jamb shape and profile. Corners are particularly hard to seal, and the intumescent seals generally have joints in this area that don't close well.  Door seals are trouble, and gaps are always present regardless of the seal approach. There are no commercially available flexible materials with adequate resilience to survive these high temperatures. The bottom line is that sealing the door is virtually impossible, and hence even a small leak of hot gasses from the outside will get in the safe and drive temperatures to failure levels very rapidly.

So, contrary to the notion that a steam saturated shell around a sealed inner container would be a good fire barrier, the complexity of ALL of thermal forces and structural issues in play make that thinking no more than a hope. I have tested safes with well sealed interior structures, and they never do well. We must exploit the cooling effect of the steam inside the safe, as well as the expanding nature of the steam gasses, to get anywhere near a controlled sub 350ºF interior environment. People have been fighting this science since the very first fire rated safes were conceived in the late 1800's. A lot of very smart people have tried to come up with a better mouse trap. Sorry to say, there are too many uneducated manufacturers that sell their untested theories to make claims that are destroyed when real fire exposure is imposed.

Very interesting. So in your experience would you say that having the Parusol is essentially a 'feel good' addition to a safe? In that under heavy fire it does not do what it's suppose to and seal the safe? Even if it did, this would actually be a hinderance to the internal temperature?

No, it's not a hindrance if you know how to build a safe properly to minimize the structural flexibility of the door and frame. I can't be too explicit here, as it's one of the key areas where testing and product development evolve a design to a level where we make the most of intumescent seals. They are vital in Gunsafe construction, because we can't build the complex interlocking jamb profiles in the inexpensive gunsafe marketplace necessary to hold a competitive position. In real Class 350 safe construction, where exposure temperatures rise above 1700ºF, far more exotic mechanical design is necessary to assure an adequate door seal that can be managed by the steam volume available and withstand the extreme thermal expansion forces.

Most of the fire ratings you see out there are complete BS, you are 100% right to have concern out there.

Working in the safe industry for many years, not all manufacturers are alike and you have to be really skeptical about what those fire ratings mean. Basically anything imported, in Costco, Wal-mart or any other box store has a really high probability of the fire rating being complete BS.

The ones that really test it and have accurate ratings are Fort Knox, Liberty and AMSEC (American Security). They've even done side by side tests with some of these cheaper options and they burn so fast you wouldn't believe your eyes. The entire inside of the safe is completely on fire when they open it. Fort Knox, Liberty and AMSEC (Domestic Product Only) are the best options in my opinion.

You also need to remember that it only keeps the internal temperature below 350 degrees so if you have data like external hard drives or computers in your safe, they will not survive. For that you specifically need a data safe, both AMSEC and Hollon make good options for that.

My safe gives me piece of mind for smash and grab attempts

Insurance covers fire

@ TheSafeGuy - when you said "If the steam is not circulated inside the safe and venting thru the jambs, this energy drives the internal ambient temperatures up very rapidly."

That makes me think its a good idea to not have things packed too densley in the safe. So air can circulate freely, esp. in the corners. Does that equate to what you've experienced in real life? Thanks in advance!

Frankly, there are no studies on safe load density in fire testing that I have seen, so I can only speculate based on experience and logic. My take is... a) a large thermal mass would slow the temperature rise a little, and b) the contents of the safe won't hinder the steam circulation enough to make a serious difference unless you are somehow sealing off large spaces. Now, if you stuffing the safe full of waterproof fabrics like tarps, that may cause issues, but I assume the word dense means things are stacked and packed, but not making a closed volume of space. I don't think I would be concerned with a fully loaded gunsafe.

Firefighter for a dozen years.  Small room and contents fire?  Almost anything will protect them.  Room fully involved?  It will hit flashover temp at some point and nothing most people can afford will then protect them.

Frankly, I think drywall in a nearly airtight safe is counterproductive given what's often in that drywall. Probably not a popular opinion here.

TheSafeGuy can tell me if I am an idiot or not, but I have all my guns in silicone gun socks inside the safe to help in the event of a fire, and I also have a sentry safe inside my safe at the bottom where I put all my important documents so it's an extra layer of protection for my social security cards, form 4's, etc.  No ammo in my primary safe either, it's all in another safe in another part of the house.

Main safe is a Liberty National Security, it's in my office on the corner edge of the bottom floor near my office windows, closest fire department is 1 mile away.