What are insurance ratings?
Depending on why you are buying your safe Insurance Ratings may or may not apply to you.
Let us look at the simplest answer first:
You are buying a safe because you want to, you are not being instructed to by your insurance company. Your valuables are already covered by your insurance company even without a safe. In these circumstances you need not worry about insurance ratings and you just need to buy a really good safe. Our recommendation would be to take a look (and watch the video) on this page
OK, now the more complicated answer:
You are buying a safe because either your insurance company insist or you have high value items that must be in a safe to be covered. The first small point here is your insurance company cannot tell you what specific safe to buy or where to buy it from. They can only guide you as to the ‘rating’ that the safe needs to be but you are free to buy it anywhere you please and naturally we hope you chose us. Simply put the rating is how much cash or the value of you valuables you can keep in the safe and expect to be covered by your own insurance company. OK, so people don’t generally keep cash at home but the rating in cash (cash rating) harps bank to the days when only banks and businesses really had safes. So, in order to convert cash ratings into valuable ratings we multiply by a factor of 10, so a safe with a cash rating of £1,000 will have a valuables rating of £10,000.
Let us imagine that you have a valuable watch worth £10,000, you therefore must need a safe rated at £10,000 valuables right? Well the answer to that is yes and no. Technically yes but safes rated that low are not very strong also if the watch goes up in value you won’t be covered. If the watch went up in value to say £11,000 and the safe was stolen you would not be paid out £10,000 (and just lose the extra £1,000), you would not be paid at all as you would not have had the correctly rated safe.
In fact safes don’t start to be strong until you get to the rating of £3,000 cash (£30,000 valuables). There are many ratings, this is a snapshot of the top of our full chart, you can see the entire chart by clicking here
| Cash Rating | Valuables Rating | Standard that should apply | Our Opinion |
|---|
| £1,000 | £10,000 | None at this rating, figure is given by maker or retailer | Superficial protection only. No real resistive strength. |
| £1,500 | £15,000 | None at this rating, figure is given by maker or retailer | Can be opened with basic burglar tools. |
| £2,000 | £20,000 | EN14450-S1 | Improving over former rating, a little harder to open. |
| £2,500 | £25,000 | None at this rating, figure is given by maker or retailer | Marginal improvement over former rating. |
| £3,000 | £30,000 | None at this rating, figure is given by maker or retailer | Starting to have tangible resistive strength. |
| £4,000 | £40,000 | EN14450-S2 | Significant improvement, especially our Bloomsbury range. |
| £5,000 | £50,000 | None at this rating, figure is given by maker or retailer | As you might imagine, marginally better than former rating. |
| £6,000 | £60,000 | EN1143-1 Eurograde 0 (Eurograde Zero) | A large leap forward, heavier and stronger safes. |
| £10,000 | £100,000 | EN1143-1 Eurograde 1 (Eurograde One) | Getting even heaver, lightest models circa 70kg+. |
You can see from this chart that some safes have 'standards' (testing and certification) and other safes do not. We have further reading on this page.
