I have a basic small home electronic safe & it’s about 15years old. I brought it from some small store & they no longer are there. And there doesn’t seem to be much contact info in the manual with the manufacturer & no mention of an internal battery. Even if I could contact them they would most probably ignore an email.
My safe has 4 AA batteries you can access on outside door, but i suspect there is an inside small lithium battery like you would find on a motherboard. Or else how do the passcodes get kept when changing the AA’s over? I have not found an easy way at all to acess this battery from inside door.
If there is an inside battery & it goes flat, do you think I would still be abe to open the door? Maybe the passcodes would just have to be reset everytime I replace my AA’s?
What do you think I should do? just get another safe since that would be better than having my stuff trapped inside.
I can’t say for certain without knowing the design of your safe, but if the manual doesn’t mention an internal battery and how to replace it, then chances are there isn’t an internal battery. It most likely stores the passcode in some type of flash memory which does not need a battery backup.
Currently made safes with electronic key pads don’t have internal batteries. The only battery is in the keypad itself. They can be changed at anytime with no bad effects.
With your unit being older it’s possible that’s not the case, but it’s unlikely. As always, your milage may vary.
On my safe the mechanical key is an additional lock beyond the keypad - you need both the key and the combination to open. We just keep the mechanical part unlocked with the key inserted in case it gets accidentally locked.
No, I mean that there is a key that will open the lock even with the electronic lock dead or destroyed. It’s not very secure. But these safes are meant to protect against fire and light-fingered losses, not even the lowest tier of burglar.
Safes with electronic keypads may or may not have a mechanical key as well. On some models, the key merely locks/unlocks the handle, which means you still need the combination. For example, Sentry makes electronic keypad safes with a push-in-pop-out tubular key cylinder next to the handle. If the cylinder is popped out, all you need is the combination. If the cylinder is pushed in, you need the key to pop it out and you also need the combination. On other models, the key is an override, allowing you to bypass the keypad entirely when you don’t know the combination or when the batteries are dead.
Returning to the OP, I have never seen a digital keypad with a replaceable internal battery. The combination is stored in non-volatile memory.
BTW, some models have the main battery (or batteries) accessible from the outside of the door and others have some sort of plug for attaching an emergency battery. It is rare to see an electronic safe that makes no provisions for a dead battery.
My batteries are on the outside of the safe, no key at all. When the batts are low it usually won’t or will struggle to open the lock. I never see the low batt message appear.
The fact that the batteries are on the outside is an example of what I meant by “provisions”. They provided for the eventuality of dead batteries by putting the batteries on the outside. When they go dead, replace them. Problem solved.
Mine, a very common Sentry fire cube, has them on the inside.
You remove the digital keypad to access the key hole (for a long, slim sort of skeleton key to unlatch the lock if the batteries or circuitry are dead).
