Lag screws with plastic sleeve or lag bolts ??

[Clarence Martin]

Need to secure a safe and want it firmly secured to the floor. Got the choice of using the Lag screws with the plastic sleeves that came with the safe or could use lag bolts and nuts. Going through a hardwood floor.

Which would be the better choice ?

[Richard Coers]

Through a floor into what? Concrete? How secure do you want it? Able to withstand a pry bar? I don't like plastic anchors in drywall, I sure wouldn't trust holding a safe down to them.

[Clarence Martin]

Basement is underneath the floor where he safe would sit.

[Rick Potter]

If the basement has an open ceiling, I would put 2X4' across a couple floor joists and use large carriage bolts with the nuts at the bottom. I doubt that will be easy to remove.

Rick Potter

PS: If you cannot find carriage bolts that long locally, use threaded rod with a nut welded on the top, and ground down so you cannot get a wench on it.

[Jeff Erbele]

Need to secure a safe and want it firmly secured to the floor. Got the choice of using the Lag screws with the plastic sleeves that came with the safe or could use lag bolts and nuts. Going through a hardwood floor.

Which would be the better choice ?

If your lag screws are going into wood, you don't need the plastic sleeves. If my vision of what you have is correct, those are for concrete. For lag screws drill a pilot hole so the wood does not split. The pilot hold diameter should be about the diameter of the main body without the threads or a little smaller.

One step better than screwing into the floor and sub-floor only would be to screw into a floor joist, if you have 2x12's. Engineered floor joints, er... maybe depending on how they are built, especially the top web.

If you use a fastener with nuts, exposed outside the safe; say on your basement ceiling; think about a potential thief simply removing those and setting the safe free for the taking. You could invert the carriage bolts (round heads in the basement) and the nuts inside the safe. They would have more holding power than lag bolts screwed into the the floor.

Entry level safes and even some that cost quite a bit, are easy to break into, with a drill, or hammer or a shim, depending on the safe design. Your best bet with a safe is to completely hide it in hidden space or compartment. If they never see it, they won't mess with it.
There are a lot of video's on you-tube, or on the internet, with various methods how to create hidden places and spaces.

If fire protection is the objective, in a house fire the safe will fall into the basement, but most are not drop-tested or rated. Then the basement fills up with water from the fire department doing their job and few safes are water tight. Then it will take a day or two for the debris to cool down in order to dig thru it and bring the safe out of the muck. So what can one do as a preventive measure?

Place the safe in the basement. If building a new house one could form a box in the basement wall to set the safe in. It could be put in the wall later, but at a much greater cost, effort and mess. One could weld metal brackets heavy enough to support the safe and anchor those to the wall. The easiest solution is to dry stack cinder blocks several courses high, to keep the safe out of the water, the fire department could potentially pump into the house.

[Jim Andrew]

Rather than installing a safe in your house, maybe you could install a piece of 6" pipe with caps, and cut a hole in the concrete floor of your basement, and install it vertically so the cap sticks up to allow you access. It would look like a pipe cleanout, and not attract the attention of anyone but plumbers. Just a thought.

[Jason Roehl]

Also good is to not talk about your security solutions in a public, online forum...