Three Ways to Safely Store Your Watches
If you have more then one watch, you essentially have a watch collection. So what do you do with your other watch (or watches) when you are leaving home or will be out of town for a couple of days (or weeks)? Allow me to offer a few options for safe storage of any watches you’re not currently wearing, to ensure that your precious collection is not subject to burglary, fire, or other loss.
1. Bank Deposit Box
Most banks offer a service in which you can rent a deposit box from them. For a small annual fee, you can store your precious watches, jewelery or important documents in a metal box that will go into a safe room. Normally, these deposit boxes are insured for a certain amount of money (ask for this!). This is perhaps the safest way to tuck away your watches when you’re planning to leave for an extended trip. However, if you’re someone who likes to regularly rotate the watches you wear, it might become annoying to go to the bank, go through the whole safe-visit procedure, and swap the contents of the safe deposit box often.
2. Safe At Home
To prevent your watches from getting stolen in the event of a burglary, you might want to consider a safe in your home. You can buy a simple metal safe from the DIY store that you can hide somewhere in your house. With either an electronic lock or a mechanical locking mechanism, these boxes keep your watches secure from theft, as long as you hide them in a safe place. Most smaller safes are easy to pick up by thieves, but many of them offer an option to use a bolt to secure them to a wall. As I’ve been told that a thief needs approximately three minutes on average to do his thing and leave, you will at least stall him a bit. You can also can get a completely tailor-made safe, with the same lacquer finish as your favorite car and with a number of watch winders inside.
3. Watch Winder And Storage Boxes
Safely tucking away your watches is not only about theft, fire and robbery, but also about protecting your watches from getting lost somewhere in the home or collecting dust. Not to mention the risk that they might be taken by your young children, one of whom might very innocently decide that your Patek Philippe Grand Complications Perpetual Calendar Chronograph would look good on the wrist of his teddy bear, or that they might become a chew toy for your German Shepherd. This means you should store your watches somewhere where they can’t be reached too easily and also protected from dust. You’ll need to wind them anyway; why not store them in a watch winder? This way your automatic-winding watch will keep running and won’t need to be wound and adjusted when you decide to take it out for wearing. After all, in the case of a time-only watch, winding and setting it manually is easy, but what if you have an automatic-winding watch with a perpetual calendar? Some of these watches are quite complex to set and if you are like me — always in a hurry in the morning — there is no time to do so.
If you are planning to buy a watch winder, pay attention to the following items:
- Does the winder have a program (i.e., number of windings, can you set the direction of winding yourself)?
- Is it easy to program the winder? (especially important when you will use it for different watches with different specifications)?
- How quiet is the winder when it’s in operation (most of the cheaper winders are so loud that you can’t put them in your bedroom because it will keep you from sleeping at night)?
- Does it come with batteries or with a power plug? (if you want to put the winder in a safe, a battery-operated model is handy)?
Although most watches have a protection against overwinding, pay attention to the maximum number of windings that are “allowed” for your watch. Some of the more professional winder manufacturers provide you with a list of movements and watches and their specifications.
I hope I’ve provided some food for though with this small article on safeguarding your precious watches. Note that safes, watch winders and storage boxes comes in all shapes and colors and also in all kinds of price categories. There is a solution for any kind of watch collection that will make financial sense.
