Gun Safe Warranties Explained

I will first go over the stan­dard time frames for gun safes war­ranties.

I will then explain the war­ranties and some of the fine print, and then how you should look for what works best for your situation.

One Year

The usual or “stan­dard” one year war­ranty for a gun or secu­rity safe cov­ers very lim­ited con­cerns. In most cases the one year war­ranties on the mar­ket are given by the lower priced gun safes or the higher end gun lock­ers and gun cab­i­nets.

There are very few things that can go wrong with a gun safe or any type of safe for that mat­ter. Your new safes lock­ing mech­a­nism can stop work­ing  all together or the lock­ing bolts can seize up or just break. The typ­i­cal one year war­ranty will either replace the failed com­po­nent or pay all of or some per­cent­age of a lock­smith to come repair. This is good enough if you bought a safe and saved a for­tune on it.

Most of the one year war­ranties have a clause that states it is non transferable. I would of course sug­gest that you ask about the war­ranties on the safe you are look­ing at, before you buy.

Five Years

As the price of a safe increases, you will see the length of the war­ranty increase also. The safes with a 1–5 year war­ranty are show­ing you the faith the com­pany has in the prod­uct they are mak­ing or sell­ing.

Do be care­ful with this though. Some of these longer safe war­ranties have a great deal of “fine print” in them to ensure that the com­pany sell­ing you this bill of goods will never have to pay out on it.

These types of war­ranties usu­ally cover the same items as the one year but they will tell you that there is a “no ques­tions asked pol­icy”. GunSafeSpot.com did the research and found that some of these longer war­ranties are will­ing to tell you that they will not fix a prob­lem that you are hav­ing with the safe because it is not cov­ered in the fine print on the war­ranty con­tract.

We had one case where the com­pany told us because we were not a home owner that the war­ranty was void.. They did not care about our prob­lems since they had already received $5000 from us just three months before.

On this sub­ject I tell peo­ple to really read the war­ranty before, dur­ing, and after the pur­chase of the safe.

War­ranty Fine Print

Just what I was talk­ing about ear­lier, the “fine print”. Here at GunSafeSpot.com we have an employee that used to work for one of the biggest insur­ance under­writ­ers in the nation and the world. They have employ­ees that are paid very well to sim­ply take the risk infor­ma­tion they come up with and cre­ate fine print in the war­ranties or con­tracts that will pro­tect them from pay­ing out to cus­tomers that file claims.

Sorry ladies and gen­tle­men, that is cor­rect, the insur­ance and war­ranty com­pa­nies have a vested finan­cial inter­est in mak­ing sure that the con­di­tions and clauses in the con­tracts are so that they do not lose a bunch of money on claims.

In most of the war­ranties we looked at and read, even the best life­time no ques­tions asked war­ranty, there was incred­i­ble fine print.

In most cases the fine print stated things like that you had to be a home­owner and have home­own­ers insur­ance.  If there is a fire then the per­son has to have a police report, fire report, a let­ter from the home own­ers insur­ance stat­ing they denied the claim and for what rea­son, and proof of pur­chase orig­i­nal receipt.

Now this is fine except the fact of the com­pany can then deny the claim based on the rea­sons the home own­ers insur­ance denies the claim and the fine print goes on to state that this is only good if the war­ranty paper­work is filed with the com­pany within 30 days of the orig­i­nal pur­chase.

So what if your rent­ing a house?

What if you for­got to file your orig­i­nal war­ranty paperwork?

So we do sug­gest you ask to see the war­ranty paper­work they offer and read it care­fully. If it is the incred­i­ble war­ranty they are using to sell a high priced safe, but there are a moun­tain of fine print clauses, then the war­ranty and higher price add no value.

Be care­ful of the “full replace­ment of con­tents and of safe claims.

Replace­ment of Safe or Destroyed Prop­erty

I really wish I had not learned the ugly truth on this one. I had bought a gun safe and stored some elec­tron­ics in it.

I had made my pur­chase because they adver­tised heav­ily that if the safe were too be in a fire, they would replace any dam­aged items and the safe for the life of my own­er­ship.

Wow, what a great deal.

The safe price was rather high, but I would only need one for the rest of my life.

Well unfor­tu­nately I had a fire at my home the house burned to the ground. Every­one in my fam­ily were safe and not home at the time. But when I made my claim to the com­pany they denied me because they said I did not have the safe orig­i­nally installed by a approved com­pany on their list.

Are you kid­ding me?!

I looked over my war­ranty fine print and it did not men­tion there was a list that they had I had to choose from. I ended up hav­ing to go to my attor­ney. My attor­ney found that if they state it has to be installed pro­fes­sion­ally that they do not have to tell you that there is a list you must pick from, it is implied.

Need­less to say I was burned both lit­er­ally and fig­u­ra­tively by the fine print of this un-named safe man­u­fac­turer. There is no such thing as a free ride and I learned that it applies in the safe war­ranty world as well.

I tell this story not to be bit­ter, but to sim­ply warn other to please read the fine print before you sign.