Floor safes have several advantages over other home safe designs. In combination, these advantages often make floor safes the best option for protection of your valuables. However, there are also some disadvantages to consider.
Advantages
Concealment
Flood safes are very easy to conceal, mostly because few people look for floor safes. A large stand-alone safe is obvious. A small safe hidden under a bed or in a closet will show up in any routine search. Even wall safes will be revealed after most searches — because people are accustomed to looking for wall safes.
A floor safe can be hidden underneath an area rug, or more effectively hidden under a heavy piece of furniture. The best solution is to hide a floor safe under a floor tile which looks just like all of your other floor tiles.
Stability
Most small safes are easy for thieves to load into trucks and open at their leisure. A properly mounted floor safe will be quite difficult for a thief to remove. The thief will have to either open the safe on your premises or move on to an easier target.
Fire Resistance
Fire travels upwards, destroying walls, ceilings, and roofs. It is much harder for fire to destroy a floor, particularly a basement floor. Floor safes are typically mounted in concrete, which gives them excellent protection against fire.
Disadvantages
Size
Most floor safes are small to medium sized, under three cubic feet, because everything that you place into them has to be raised or lowered by hand. You won’t find a lot of floor safes large enough to hold a rifle.
Access
It can be difficult to get down on your knees to access a floor safe. This is particularly true for us older folks who used our bodies extensively during our youth.
Flooding
Even if your floor safe is waterproof, you won’t want to open it if your floor is covered in a foot of standing water.
Installation
Floor safes are easy to install when a new floor is being laid. Installing a floor safe in an existing floor requires cutting and digging into the floor — a necessarily messy proposition.
Summary
A floor safe is the best option for many, but not all, home safe buyers.
