My husband and I have had one of these Yale Electronic Home Safes for around 3 years now, buying it after we unfortunately got burgled. Thankfully the *******s were disturbed, so they didn't actually get away with anything, but we felt at the time that it would be a good idea to get a little safe to keep valuables in and stash this away somewhere hidden in the house to make things a little more secure.

We only paid around £30 for this safe from a small electronics shop, and we chose the black version over the silver colour the safe came in because we thought this both looked nicer although it doesn't really matter as our safe is well hidden, and any potential burglars wouldn't have a clue it was where it is anyway. No-one aside from myself and my husband knows where it is, so there's no risk of a burglar or other villain from spotting it or knowing about it.

One of the features I liked about this safe is the fact you can bolt it to the floor, so in the event that it's whereabouts are discovered, a robber can't simply pick the safe up and walk off with it, opening it at their leisure someplace safe. We found bolting it to a immovable surface to be fairly easy, I think it only took my husband 5 minutes to bolt it down in the hiding place.

The safe comes with full, easy to understand instructions on how to use it, starting with inserting 2 x AA batteries into the door of the safe to power the locking bolts that slide shut once the door is closed, locking the safe. Once the batteries are in, you enter your chosen 3-8 digit code on the easy to use keypad, and set this code as the one to lock/unlock your safe.

The safe also comes with 2 overriding keys, which if you forget your pin, you can use to unlock the safe manually. We keep these well hidden in the house also, so no one would know what the keys were for even if they found them, plus the keyhole on the safe is hidden (you'll find out where when you buy one) so it's not even obvious there IS a key for the safe.

One of the extra features is that if you put the wrong pin number into the safe 3 times in a row, an alarm goes off. We set this off once to test how loud it was etc, and it was enough to be heard from our bedroom at the other end of the house, and would probably wake us if we were asleep. The alarm runs for a couple of minutes and I imagine it's noisy enough to put people off trying to steal from the safe, particularly at night time.

We've had to change the batteries twice in about 3 years since buying this safe, but there is a battery indicator on the front of the LCD display on the safe, meaning you are always alerted as to when they are running out. If by any chance you do let the batteries die completely, you'll have to use the override keys to open the safe.

At approximately 25cm x 40cm x 25cm in dimensions, this safe is big enough for us to keep a variety of valuable in it, and the safe is very easy to set up and operate. The safe is a tough, heavy little thing made out of toughened steel so it won't give in to being battered by power tools, which is handy. Whilst this safe might not keep a hardened professional criminal away from it's contents for long, we feel that the safe is secure and tough enough to deter most petty criminals and house burglers, and we feel much better having our most valuable items safely locked away in this safe, hidden in the house.