Author's product rating: 
| Advantages: |
Sturdy, great when working well, can be bolted to floor |
| Disadvantages: |
A nightmare when playing up |
| Recommend to potential buyers: |
no |
I wouldn't say my boss is mean but he can easily peel an orange in his pocket. He has a not inconsiderable annual budget to run the project but one would think it's his own money he's spending. Since he is so mean you might expect him to look after the money carefully but when the finance director found out how we stored our petty cash he nearly blew a gasket. He ordered us to purchase a safe immediately.
Ideally we should have bought a floor safe that would be bolted to the ground but these are not only very expensive but need quite a bit of consideration as to where you are going to put them. We don't have much room and the project deals with young offenders to we prefer to have the safe situated out of view.
Always hoping to save money his Lordship reached for the Argos catalogue and scanned the pages, pulled on his coat and left the office, returning later on with a request for a £40 reimbursement for the safe he was carrying under his arm.
The Micromark safe can be bolted to the floor but we keep ours in the drawer of a conventional size filing cabinet. It's a bit smaller than the smallest microwave oven. It's heavy; I can barely pick it up myself, the boss can do it with a bit of effort.
I have to say it does look cheap, but who cares what it looks like so long as it does the job? Suffice to say it has a pale grey metallic finish and is hardwearing. It has an electronic number pad on the door next to a round handle. In between the two is a flat plastic panel which with a little difficulty can be opened up to reveal a keyhole which can be used should the workings fail or you forget the code.
Inside the safe is fairly spacious; inside ours is our petty cash tin (medium size), bags of change, a few documents and small odds and ends. It would be fine for items of jewellery, important documents such as passports or any other small items you might wish to keep safe.
When you get your safe it is set to a factory code so the first thing to do is set your own. This you do by pressing a small silver button on the inside edge of the safe door. Then you enter the code you have chosen on the number pad and confirm.
When you enter the code to open the safe it will bleep an affirmative response, show a yellow light on the number panel and the mechanism will allow you to open the safe using the handle. When you close the safe again you need only close the door and turn the handle. If you enter the code in correctly the number panel will flash orange and bleep a different response. You have three chances and if you fail three times, the machine will bleep continuously for one minute, during which time you can't make another attempt. Further unsuccessful attempts will shut the machine off for ten minutes before you can try again.
The machine is powered by four AA batteries. In the first three years we replaced them once. Then, a few weeks ago after a couple of occasions when we had to use the key to open the safe instead because the number panel was not working we changed them again. There were still problems and we tried to reset the number but it continually reverted to our previous code. We changed the batteries again but this did not help and then we found that we couldn't even use the key to gain entry. After an hour of trying we managed to remove the contents of the safe and we had to leave them relatively unprotected for a few days until a new safe could be procured - a floor bolted conventional safe this time.
For the reasonably cheap price of just under £40.00 we had almost three years of untroubled service from our Micromark Safe which I think isn't bad going for one that is used in a busy workplace and is probably designed more for more limited domestic use. However, the problems we had towards the end are quite concerning; I have no idea what we would have done if we hadn't eventually been able to get the thing open.
I would recommend this product from use in the home but not the work place unless you expect not to use it a great deal. The size is probably better suited to a workplace and I would think most homes could probably manage with something a little smaller.
