Container security — lock boxes, padlocks and siting the doors

The realistic threat

Start by being honest about who is actually going to have a go at your container, because the answer changes what is worth spending money on.

The overwhelming majority of container break-ins are opportunistic. Someone walking past a site at night with a set of bolt cutters and a few minutes to spare. They are not cutting steel, they are not bringing a grinder, and they are certainly not bringing oxy gear. They are looking for an exposed padlock shackle, a door left unsecured, or a unit somewhere nobody can see them working.

A much smaller group turns up equipped, having decided in advance that this particular container is worth the effort. That normally means they know what is inside — plant, tooling, copper, quad bikes, fuel. Against that group no padlock is the answer; visibility, lighting, alarms and not advertising the contents are.

Practically nobody cuts through the wall of a container. It is slow, loud, throws sparks, and the doors are always easier. Design your security around the door end and you have covered nearly all of it.

The lock box

It is a steel shroud welded onto the right-hand door, shaped so that the padlock sits wholly inside it. The shackle is enclosed on the top and both sides, with only a narrow slot to get the lock in and out. Bolt cutters cannot reach the shackle. A grinder cannot get a disc onto it at a useful angle.

It is the single most effective security fitting you can put on a container and it is not expensive. If a unit does not have one, having one welded on is straightforward work for anyone with a welder and a bit of sense about where the door frame is.

Two things to check on a lock box:

• Sizing. A box built for a small padlock will not take a big one. Take the padlock with you, or fit the box to suit the lock you intend to use, not the other way around.
• Which door it protects. A lock box secures the door that opens second — the one that overlaps. That is enough, because the other door cannot open while it is held. If both doors are being padlocked separately, one of those locks is exposed.

Ask whether a lock box is fitted before you buy or hire. It is a common fitting on hire fleets and a common option on sales. Details on what comes standard sit on the container sales page and the hire page.

Choosing a padlock

Padlock choice matters more than people think, and the wrong shape defeats the lock box entirely.

Closed-shackle or shrouded padlock. The shackle is almost entirely enclosed by the lock body. There is nothing for a bolt cutter to bite. This is the right shape whether or not a lock box is fitted, and it is essential if one is not.

Container-specific discus or puck lock. A round hardened disc that sits inside a matching hasp with no exposed shackle at all. Very hard to attack, cheap, and designed for exactly this job. Popular for good reason.

Long-shackle padlocks. Convenient and useless. An exposed shackle is a bolt cutter's entire purpose in life. Do not put one on a container you care about.

Beyond shape, look for a hardened boron or steel shackle, a body that will not shear, and a decent weather rating — a lock that seizes with rust in twelve months gets replaced with whatever is in the drawer, which is how a good setup quietly degrades. Keying alike across multiple containers is worth arranging if you have several, because a site with six different keys ends up with all six on one ring in the ute.

Siting the container so the doors are hard to reach

This is free, it is decided in the thirty seconds before the truck sets the container down, and it does more than any hardware you can buy afterwards.

• Point the doors at something. A wall, a fence, a shed, a bank, a large tree. If someone cannot stand square in front of the doors with room to swing them, they cannot work on them either. You need around 2.5 m for the door swing, so leave that and no more.
• Do not point them at the street or a rear laneway. Doors facing a public boundary are doors that can be worked on from a vehicle.
• Face them towards the house or the office. Towards where people are, and towards where a light and a camera can see them.
• Back it against a boundary. With one long side hard against a fence and the doors turned inwards, three of the four approaches are gone.
• Two containers can protect each other. Set parallel with a gap between them and both sets of doors opening into that gap, they form their own compound.
• Think about the roof. A container beside a fence is a ladder over that fence. Sometimes that is your problem; sometimes it is your neighbour's.

Work this out at the same time as the pads and the levelling. Once the container is down, changing which way it faces is a truck job.

Lighting and sight lines

Opportunistic offenders need to not be seen. Everything that makes them visible works, and light is the cheapest of it.

A sensor light aimed at the door end is worth more than an extra padlock. Solar sensor lights are good enough for a paddock or a back corner where there is no power, and they need nothing run to them. Keep the sensor clear of a branch that will trigger it all night, because a light everyone has learned to ignore is not a deterrent.

Clear the vegetation around the container as well. Screening plants that hide an ugly box from you also hide a person working on it. If the container is genuinely visible from a kitchen window, a neighbour's driveway or a road, that visibility is doing real work.

Cameras help mostly after the fact, but a visible camera pointed at the door end changes the calculation for someone deciding whether to bother. If you fit one, make sure it covers the approach as well as the doors — footage of a person already at the container is much less useful than footage of them arriving.

Layers that are worth the money

1. Lock box and closed-shackle padlock. The baseline. Do this first, always.
2. Door orientation. Free, decided on delivery day, and permanent.
3. Sensor lighting. Cheap, effective against the opportunist.
4. A second lock or a locking bar clamp. Clamps that lock over the vertical bars stop them being turned even if the main lock is defeated. Slows an attack down significantly.
5. An alarm. Battery or solar container alarms exist and are not expensive. Noise ends most attempts.
6. Perimeter. A locked gate before the container is another delay and another decision point.
7. Not advertising. Do not sign the container with what is in it. A plain box tells nobody anything.

Things that seem like good ideas and are not

• Chaining the doors. Chain is easy to cut and it damages the door hardware. A proper lock in a proper box is better in every way.
• Welding the doors shut. People genuinely do this. It works right up until you want the container to be a container.
• Hiding the key on site. Under the container is the first place anyone looks, because it is where everyone puts it.
• Relying on weight. An empty container is only a couple of tonne and a tilt-tray can take it. Stock and plant get stolen inside the container it was stored in more often than people imagine.
• Cheap hasps bolted on. Anything bolted can be undone. Anything welded cannot.

If you are storing something genuinely valuable

At some point the container stops being the security system and starts being the shell around it. If you are storing tooling, plant, quad bikes or anything with an easy resale, treat the container as the outer layer and put a real layer inside it: a bolted-down safe or gun cabinet fixed through the floor into the cross members, wheel clamps or ground anchors for anything on wheels, and asset marking on everything.

Also think about insurance. Contents stored in a container on your own property may or may not be covered by your policy, and cover often turns on details like whether the container is locked, lit, fenced or at a stated address. Read the policy before you fill the box, not after.

Ask before delivery, not after

Lock boxes, lock configurations and door orientation are all much easier to sort before a container is delivered than afterwards. Tell us what is going in it and where it will stand, and we will tell you what is worth fitting. Ring 0477 410 500 or use the contact page, and the FAQs cover the questions that come up most often.