Safe
deposit lockers are used by people who want to protect important documents,
expensive items like heirloom jewellery, or emergency money reserves, among
other things. Storage lockers are most commonly located in bank vaults, and are
rented to banking customers. A safe deposit locker is usually protected by at
least one lock, often more, and is generally made of indestructible material.
The term “safe deposit
locker” is primarily used in Great Britain and current and former British
Commonwealth countries, including Australia and India. Most North Americans
would refer to the same concept as a “safe deposit box.” The term nearly always
refers to a safe that exists as one unit among many, usually in the vault of a
bank or other financial institution. Hotels occasionally will also maintain a
bank of safe deposit lockers for guest use, particularly if room safes are not
available. Sometimes personal lockboxes in homes and offices are referred to as
safe deposit lockers, but most of the time, freestanding units are simply
called safes.
There are a number
of features or characteristics which may vary in lockers. Because purchasers
will need to specify what they want in each of these when ordering, it is more
common to order a particular configuration rather than buy "off the
shelf" in a shop, although certain very common configurations can be found
in shops fairly easily. These features include:
·
Bank size: This specifies the number of lockers wide a unit is. It does not necessarily
refer to the total number of compartments, but rather the number of
compartments wide the entire cabinet is. So a bank of three may contain six
lockers, for example, if they are two-tier lockers. In short, the total number
of lockers is the bank size multiplied by the number of tiers. Sometimes the
term "bay" is used instead of "bank", although
"bank" appears to be the more standard term; on other occasions,
"bay" refers to a single locker width within a bank, including all
tiers of locker directly on top of each other.
