Keep Your Home Safe At Home Where It Belongs
We have and recommend bolt together safes like the Little Titan home safe because they are easy for you to install by yourself where you want it.
But does that make the safe easy to steal, with the thieves taking it back to their shop where they have tools and time to open it at their convenience? (And post the video on YouTube besides!)
Most of these safes have a pre-drilled hole or holes in the bottom so you can bolt them down, preferably to a concrete floor. (The Little Titan has 2 holes pre-drilled in the bottom.)
The problem with that is that many owners of Little Titan home safes, and comparable products, are renters and may not feel comfortable drilling into the floor either because fear of “damage” deposit loss or not sure what they will hit.
Perhaps they do not own or have never used a hammer drill. (CAUTION: If you have a post-tensioned concrete slab do NOT drill without a professional to ascertain safety of doing so.)
Here Is A Way To Make Your Safe Heavier
In this discussion were making some presumptions:
- Your safe is not already loaded down with heavy silver
- The safe is a fairly secure one that would take a fair amount of time for most thieves to open while in your home; more time than they want to spend there
- Hauling your safe out of your home lock, stock and barrel is a reasonable concern for your circumstances
So what can you do to help secure your safe, making it a tad more burglar proof, either in addition to or instead of bolting it down?
After all, anyone with any experience with concrete anchors knows that:
- Sometimes they hold well; other times, though…
- A long enough pry bar can do wonders
- Some safes, like the larger Titan Closet Vault Safe, are tall enough to be a lever in themselves.
How Cheap Is Sand?
The home safes we have talked about here are fairly light by themselves. And maybe you don’t have a few hundred pounds of silver. Gold, is light per value and so is cash.
Sand, however, is real cheap.
Depending on where you live, rocks maybe a good alternative but I will tell you why I like sand.
Sand can be put in a clean, neat, seal-able plastic jar. Powdered supplements come to mind. Wash out the container, fill it with dry sand (wet is heavier but we don’t want anything growing in there), and put it in the bottom of the safe.
A 250 pound safe could easily become a 300 pound safe very quickly.
Maybe you even have or can acquire a few bars of cheap lead; kind of even looks like silver, eh? While two guys might find 250 pounds an acceptable midnight carry, 300 – 350 just makes it all that much harder. Load the bottom of the safe with worthless ballast, guns on the middle shelf, cash and gold coins on the top.
Silver does well also; Silver bars even stack nicely. Maybe ammo on the bottom. It’s easy to be creative; sand should actually be a last resort if you don’t have enough Silver or ammo (which, you can fix that problem 🙂 ).
This is a fast, inexpensive way to make your home safe just that little bit harder to walk away with. And when you want to move it, you can easily open the door and take out the ballast to lighten YOUR load.
Please post your thoughts. Maybe you have thought of something we haven’t and we would be appreciative if you would share that.
