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If you're considering self-storage, you need to ensure that you take a variety of safety precautions. The following procedures will help you choose the safest site, understand its security measures, and maintain the safety proficiency of your site's door.

Assessing Possible Break-In Risks

Before paying good money for a storage facility, you want to make sure you minimize your risk of break-ins. Picking one in a relatively safe neighborhood can help in this task, but gauging an area's safety by sight is often an impossible task.

Thankfully, there are online neighborhood safety websites that can give you an idea of how prominent crime is in your self-storage facility's neighborhood. While this won't 100% accurately predict the possibility of a break-in at your facility, it can at least give you an idea of the safety of the neighborhood.

Discuss Facility Safety Measures

One more step to take before choosing a self-storage facility is to sit down with the owner and discuss the site's available safety measures. Safety measures to discuss with a self-storage facility owner include:

• 24-hour video surveillance
• Theft and damage insurance options
• Cleaning and maintenance procedures
• Exterior fencing
• Pest control methods

Any good self-storage center should have some form of these procedures in place. If they don't, you may want to consider a facility that does.

Maintaining The Site's Door

The most important way you can keep your belongings safe in a storage center is maintaining your site's door. First of all, you have to understand the different types of doors you might run into at a storage facility. These doors include:

• Hollow metal doors – three-hinged doors that automatically close
• Corrugated swing doors – interior doors with sheets of metal and hinges that allow 180-degree access
• Roll-up doors – the most common type of interior and exterior door, it is made of sheets that roll up across the ceiling track of your storage site

Each of these require different maintenance procedures. For example, hollow metal doors require lubricating the hinges with a rag and oil and clearing snow away from the surface (as they are prone to rust damage). Latches on corrugated swing doors often need to be adjusted with a screwdriver for proper closing. And roll-up doors need the opening shafts (located near the rails) to be regularly lubricated with a rag and some oil

Other maintenance procedures on these doors (such as fixing alignment, repairing exterior damage, and changing chain tension) are best performed by a professional. Trying these difficult procedures on your own is likely to result in door damage.

Choosing A Lock

After performing basic maintenance steps on your door, you need to choose the best lock to seal up your site. There are three main options: keyless locks, padlocks, and disc locks:

• Keyless locks use an electronically-controlled keypad to seal. Unfortunately, they are often useless in facilities that don't offer you access to electricity. And if the power goes out? So does the lock.
• Padlocks aren't a bad option, because they will limit access to only people with the right key. However, there is a risk of them being picked or opened with a counterfeit key.
• Disc locks can only be opened with a specific combination, which makes picking them nearly impossible. Cutting or breaking disc locks away is also extremely difficult, due to their strength.

Now that you're finished with these tasks, your self-storage experience should be as safe as possible. Make sure to regularly check in with your site to ensure that no one has broken in and stolen anything. You should also check your belongings to make sure that it is being properly maintained by the facility owners in a safe storage area.