In another recent thread I was discussing how the location of a safe in a burning structure could impact its ability to survive the fire.  I dug through my collection to find these photos from a few years back.  It is a Liberty safe that uses gypsum board.  As in the other example, this safe was on the concrete slab of a residential garage against an exterior wall.  There was no car in the garage during the fire.  Similar to the other thread this safe was located in a very rural area and had the opportunity to really get going before fire personnel arrived.

Although they were able to get water on the house to get the fire knocked down, the garage was already completely gone.  Being in the garage allowed this safe to protect its contents as well as it did.  Fast fire without much to burn.

Moisture cause the shelves to break?  Do you know what type of Liberty that was, I am curious what "fire rating" it had?  Considering they have everything from 30min up to 2+hrs.

Mine are MDF or some sort of shit particle board, not ply or anything substantial. Not the same brand safe though.

Franklin with a 75 minute rating.  The shelving in many gun safes is made out of particle board or similar.  They sag naturally under weight, but the heat and moisture does them in.  It's not uncommon to find the contents of gun safe shelves dumped onto the floor of the safe after a fire.  This particular safe didn't have much weight on them, and over the years manufacturers have started to support their shelves better.

Were the contents of the safe protected? Guns ok?

We need a burned safe pic thread.

It's hard to see in the photo, but the bow was toast.  Everything else was spared from any serious heat damage.  Typical moisture and soot issues.  I usually don't follow up after the fact, but I suspect either he or his insurer sent the guns off to a gunsmith for complete disassembly, cleaning, and preservation.

Surface rust will develop very quickly after a fire.  You get hot temperatures combined with steam and who knows what other chemicals.  Corrosion starts at that moment.  Then you have to let the safe sit at least over night to let it cool down enough to work on it.  The longer it sits the worse things get inside.

A side story to this particular incident.  When I received the call I asked about power.  If we do not have access to power we bring a generator with us.  They told us that there was power to a pole about 50 feet from the garage and that there was a breaker with outlet on that pole.  The electric company had cut the power across the road but would come out to energize the lines so we could use that outlet.  Something was shorted out.  When they reached up with their pole to energize those lines it sounded like a typical "I'm being electrocuted" noise.  It melted the line that ran to the pole which then dropped to the ground several feet from us.  Scary stuff.

Surprised the bow was toast.  I could expect some plastic parts and the string to be damaged, but would think otherwise it would be easily repairable.

I dont keep my bow in the safe right now, because there isnt room for it.  It is worth as much or more than many of my guns.  Probably needs better means of protecting it that sitting on my shelf.

So which is better, gypsum or high temp insulation, or even refractory material?

The gypsum board ask is an insulator and the moisture released acts as fire retardant. It is obviously only good for so much time.

In your experience, how well do the safe doors fire seal on the door do at sealing the doors off?

It's no different than a ballistics question.  The military sniper will give you a different answer than the guy who read about a sniper rifle in a magazine once.

There are generally several shortcomings in gypsum lined safes that reduce their ability.  Gaps and lack of support are the largest two.  It is not uncommon to see these safes where the gypsum board has baked out, crumbled up, and fallen to the bottom of the safe.

On this particular safe the seals did OK.  You can see where it adhered itself to the frame in one of those photos.  If the safe isn't near the immediate fire it may be exposed to moisture and gasses prior to the seals getting hot enough to expand.  They seem to do better when the fire starts near the safe.  In really bad fires the safe can contort itself.  This may open up the seal.  I have also seen safes with doors so loose that the seal would expand to the extent of its ability and may still not seal the door well.

Painting with a broad brush, cast insulation.  I will define that as any material that starts out as some sort of "liquid", is pumped into the safe, and then "cures".  Over the years there have been many variations of this that have proven effective.  Some of these materials feel dry to the touch, some feel wet.  Some are hard, some are soft.  What they all have in common is that they fill every void, don't have any gaps, have an inner safe wall that supports them, and contain moisture.

Gypsum board quasi falls into this category.  It is a cast material (by my definition as I'm using it here) that is cast into panels as opposed to into the cavity of the safe.  This is why it is effective in fires when it's installed in a fashion that defeats the aforementioned shortcomings.

A1,

Thanks for your contribution to the forum.

On the subject of moisture and rust. Have you seen any effective means of protecting the firearms in a safe from rust during/after a fire? Have you seen good performance from the silicone socks?

I have an Amsec CE and while I'm quite confident in it's ability to protect my stuff in a fire, I do worry about the steam and byproducts of the fire.

Additionally, I've thought about adding some of this around the door frame as a passive smoke keeper-outer until the active stuff starts working. Any thoughts? Worth my time/effort?

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B009RWG3TY/ref=ya_aw_oh_bia_dp?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Anything that is heat resistant and fairly air tight will work.  I've seen silicone socks do well, and they are probably the easiest to use.  In another thread plastic bags were discussed.  Smaller items can go in Tupperware.  Just be mindful that whatever you use has to be resistant to several hundred degrees.  If you're using plastic containers, make sure they are microwave safe.

I don't see any harm in adding a seal, but I will tell you that the composite safe you have will do well without it.  I posted it some time ago, but I had a customer with one of these in a complete burn down.  The safe was in the fire and smoldering rubble well beyond its rating.  The contents were mostly fine.  A few plastic items suffered some deformation.  Most importantly the cash survived inside of regular white business envelopes.

Gypsum sheets always struck me as an inelegant solution.

I have 12,000lbs of K26 soft firebrick.  I wanna line a safe and set it on fire.  

I'd like to try the same with Kaowool blankets.  Though cost prohibitive for either brick or blanket in a consumer offering(bricks are $6 each), could be a fun project.  Think I'll check walmart and see how big of a stackon box they have.

I hate to start another sh!t show but the mission isn't to insulate the safe from the heat. It's nearly impossible. The moisture in the above products absorbs and puts the BTUs to work creating steam. If the safe has x lbs of fill with y moisture content, it can handle a certain amount of BTUs and then it is done for.

Instead of wasting effort on trying new / better insulators, throw a sprinkler or two in the safe room.

I'm not trying to further the argument.  I have insurance, no need for sprinklers.

I'll agree keeping a box insulated from heat is nearly impossible, within reasonable expense.  However, I have a pile of bricks in my way and some idle curiosity.

Unless someone has some research to share, I see a bonfire in my future.

In for the results. Some people don't know how to have fun.

I think you should buy one of those wireless thermometers for smoking meat. Put it in the safe, and measure the temp every minute or so.

Edit: and video!

Video,,, had not thought of that.  Off to find some pallets.  Anybody know how many pallets constitutes a structure fire?  

Not sure where you can get pallets. Home Depot, Lowes, walmart garden center?

Just don't steal the blue ones.

The line of conversation is pretty interesting. It happens that when UL started doing fire testing in the late 1890's, they actually did start with a test subject nested inside a stack of railroad ties. The Thermocouple was invented some 80 years earlier, becoming a practical measurement tool in the 1850's, and this testing was the birth of the fire exposure profile now know as the ASTM E119 fire curve. Later tests were run with a coal-fired furnace.

In any event, the UL72 Standard has been the foundation of fire testing for over 100 years. All the arguments about testing consistency and accuracy have long been dismissed. You don't use a standard testing program world-wide in a million life-critical applications for that long if there were even a moderate degree of concern for repeatability. Thermodynamic principles and empirical results are in complete harmony. ETL runs the same kind of structured testing program, based on the UL protocols and controls. Concerns about testing consistency have long ago been answered.

The key issue is that of exposure levels. We have volumes of testimonials and burn tests that say the E119 curve is quite a bit higher temperature profile that what really happens in "most" residential fires. Of course there are cases where extraordinary conditions present the more extreme levels that are represented in the E119 curve, but they are generally considered rare. The UL72 Standard is a very conservative test program, and if you have that level of rating you can be assured the safe will survive just about anything that can happen for a given test period, or a longer period at lower exposure temperatures.

However, there is ample evidence that 1200ºF is closer to the normal near ceiling height exposure in residential environments, where accelerants are generally limited and the simple structure does not provide a huge payload of combustibles. That temperature is generally found to be an upper limit where the structure is rapidly breaking down, self ventilating and allowing huge volumes of cool air feeding the ever-rising immolation toward the sky. Temperatures near the ground are generally agreed to be MUCH lower, as exhibited by the reality that firefighters enter and survive in burning homes regularly. In addition, most homes have intentional fire-resistance in their construction, by virtue of drywall and plaster walls covering the wood that is actually burning in the walls.

The precise temperature obviously varies in every fire event. But, we need to pick a number, and provide a test protocol that this class of safe can survive. With that, a comparison can be made thereafter. If 1200º is too low, or too high, is a moot point. It's a baseline by which safes can be compared, right or wrong. None of these drywall lined "Gunsafes" can survive even 15 minutes in a UL 72 Class 350 1/2 hour test program, I assure you. The energy influx is just too intense. So the argument that a UL72 rating is necessary is not supported by the price-points this market requires.  For those that think a Class 125 or Class 150 rating is practical are living even further from reality. The technology to get there is even greater by a large margin, complicated by a maximum humidity limit in that requirement that makes construction a whole lot more complex.

Champion Safe Fire Protection Info

Interesting that it took more than 105 minutes for the furnace to reach the target 1700f. I seem to recall @TheSafeGuy saying their furnace tests (or more correctly, the company who does their testing) will heat to the target temp in about 8 minutes. But, maybe that was just for one specific test.

The chart on their site is terribly blurry.

Attached File

The problem with that chart is evident if you listen to what NYresq1 says in the other thread.  A fire doubles in intensity every 90 seconds.  In a real life fire you're getting that heat much more quickly.  You can't say "our safe will last for two hours in a fire" when your test is taking 30 to 40 minutes to even get to temperature.  This is why in ETL's test the 1,200 degree mark is made at 8 minutes.  Much more realistic.

The Area under the fire curve represents Energy. I won't bore you with the math, but that means a slow rise imparts far less energy flux on the target safe. It's very common for self-listings to only reach the published test temperature at the end of the period defined. Assuming there was a test, this is a pretty significant cheat.

Below is real data from one of the ETL tests. All the tests run have similar graphs. The Red line is the target temperature. In this test one TC was eliminated (#4 failed), and another ran low. The low one caused the test technician to run the other TC's hot thru the whole test because they use an average to control the variable burners and flues. This array of furnace TCs are all around the safes, between and around in a grid. We are always concerned about cold spots, so we have them outfit with 8 furnace TC's to be sure there is no hot or cold areas.

Champion Safe After Fire

https://championsafe.com/champion-safe-survives-wildfire/

Fixed your link

Eta: Some observations.

1) Seems as though the safe performed well.

2) Is that part of the roof that is sagging and still intact? Could it be assumed that the decking is OSB or plywood, which most likely wouldn't still be standing under the conditions presented by a fire of that type? I'm not sure of the building codes in that part of the country.

3) I'm having a hard time believing this was an uncontrollable wildfire that burned/smoldered for 2 days at 2,000f+ and was unreachable by fire crews. There are large trees still standing right behind the house. Several are actually full of green leaves, and look unscathed.

I'm not a fire inspector. Nor, do I play one on TV. These details just stuck out to me as odd.