The second in a series of regular webinars with Kevin Ayres and Craig Whale from Robinsons Facilities Services in Harrogate serving the whole of Yorkshire. The second topic is Lift Maintenance for commercial buildings and facilities.
Lunchtime Learning Webinar Lift Maintenance
Hello and welcome to another Lunchtime Learning webinar from Robinson’s Facility Services.
We had a great response to our last webinar on pest control, and I know you’re going to have another great session today.
We’ve got our resident expert in all about lifts. So without further ado, why don’t I invite our expert, Craig Whale. Craig, are you there?
Let’s see. Yay! I’m here. Thank you for having me. And welcome, welcome to the show, I suppose we could call it. I have to warn you, there may be one or more Lift-based puns in this webinar, so sort of a future warning, but yeah, great to have you on the show. So we’ve talked a little bit before, but I guess it’s a busy time of year for you, right?
Because it’s kind of, everybody’s back to work and everybody’s like, oh, flip, my Lyft’s broken over the summer or whatever. So is that how you, is that what you’re finding? Absolutely. I mean, it’s busy this time of year anyway. We tend to have a lot more people going away on holiday. So we can be down to skeleton staff in other areas such as suppliers, which slows down materials and what have you.
But also right down to a simple thing like getting from one place to another. The traffic can make that such a nightmare. Unfortunately, we don’t have helicopters. And so traffic is a bit of a problem for us. And at this time of year, this direction of travel, but not this direction of travel, right? That’s the one. That’s the one.
You need one of those uh, I was a big fan of Roald Dahl so you need one of those great glass elevators that can just kind of go everywhere anywhere I guess you know I’m not sure that most people’s stomachs could handle that yes true and I’d like to see you try and ensure that as well so which we’re going to get on to or maintain it you know so uh the sky hooks and sugar I think that probably runs on finding it might be a problem
Brilliant. Well, look, why don’t we dive in? We’ve got lots of people online. So what we’re going to do is I’m going to ask Craig some questions that hopefully will bring out some information that you’re going to find really helpful for about thirty minutes, something like that. And at the end, towards the end, we’re going to do a Q&A. So feel free.
There’s a chat function on the webinar. So feel free to type in any questions you might have for Craig. You’ve got him, you can grill him. If not, I’ve got a few more quickfire questions I can ask him as well. So Craig, why don’t we dive in?
So what types of lifts are commonly found in commercial premises? I think you’ll find primarily it’s passenger lifts and goods lifts, sort of like the top of the chain there. So you’ve got your passenger lift just for the general moving people around in a building.
Goods lifts… as it says on the tin. So you’ll find that you’ll get those more in sort of like warehouse environments and sort of industrial buildings. But then we go on to platform lifts for wheelchair users. They tend to be a little bit easier to sort of slot into an area and get installed.
So they’re a good solution for a lot of people. And then we’ve got like dumbwaiters, which you’ll find in environments such as hotels for moving food or laundry. Yeah. So I’d say they were the main ones anyways. There’s probably many, many more. I’ve just not listed. Do you find, you know, you sort of see in old films, you know, these sort of gated lifts and things like that.
Do people still have any of those sort of old style lifts or is it all just kind of what we’d imagine? Oh no, absolutely. I’ve seen many of them. You mean like the old, I don’t know if we’re allowed to say, but something like on Friends back in the nineties with the one in the apartment block, like that all over the place.
Right. More so with, Goods lifts, I would say now. But yeah, that is something that we still have on the books. The old ones tend to be such sturdy pieces of equipment that they’re still around. You know, there’s things a lot older than me carrying people up and down in buildings at the minute.
Wow it’s amazing look they have some such longevity and I guess because it’s such a safety thing it’s so important to maintain them and especially for those really old ones because it’s almost like for some of those lifts it’s almost kind of becoming an artisan sort of craft type thing right It is.
With newer lifts, what you tend to find is with newer lifts, when they sort of get older and you’ll come across obsolescence, so it’s harder to get parts for them. And so that’s when you start looking at upgrading and what have you.
But with the older, older ones, the ones from sort of like the sixties, seventies and eighties, you tend to find that there’s a lot more engineering involved. So it’s been easier to keep those ones going because of the simplistic nature of them. Sort of.
I’ve just finally sold my old Land Rover and it’s a bit like that with Land Rovers, right? You know, they’re a bit less complex, so you can kind of just fix stuff rather than, you know, having to take out the NTD and, you know, they’re all sealed units.
So, okay, that’s interesting that applies. I guess that makes sense, yeah, so. It’s a bit more obvious what to do rather than sealed units and things.
So moving on to, and I guess that we talked about the lifts back in the sixties and how things developed. So what are the legislative requirements now for maintaining a lift in a commercial property?
So generally you’ll have sort of two things to go down. You’ve got lift maintenance, which would be sort of like your service, which we would always recommend at least once every sort of six months. That changes depending on sort of the footfall, the usage of the lift. But that’s something that you would probably talk to your competent person.
So a lift owner would get a competent person put in place to carry out what’s called a supplement, not supplementary test, sorry, a LOLA, which is a lift operations and maintenance lift equipment regulations, thorough examination.
Apologies. I’m so used to saying Lawler and you forget what they are. But yeah, so you have these done. So if it’s a goods lift, a goods only lift, it must have a LOLA examination once every twelve months. And if it’s a passenger carrying one, it must have one every six months. And then off the back of that, they would then outline what other requirements they might have.
So you’ll get a report back from that inspection and that inspection will outline if additional testing is required, if they’re happy with the frequency of the maintenance and if there’s anything that they’ve sort of seen that they’re not happy with that needs attention. Sometimes they’ll put a timed defect against it, or they might just simply say as an observation, this needs to be kept an eye on. A bit like an MOT with a car, really, with the recommendations.
Now, this responsible person, is that somebody named almost like a health and safety person on MOT?
The company side or is it required to have an expert from a company like yours or from the government or somebody like that to do that inspection?
Who has to do the inspection? Yeah, it needs to be somebody that understands the equipment and understands the machine. So what a lot of people do and what these reports are actually known in the industry by a lot of people of our insurance reports, because a lot of the time people will speak to their buildings insurance and get the LOLA examinations done through them.
But that can also be lift maintenance companies as well. It doesn’t have to be exclusively insurance. There is a set procedure, there’s a set amount of information that needs to go onto these forms that legally does need to be there to be passed on to the client for them to have that documented then and stored, obviously, for any options that are needed in the future.
So in theory, it could be the client themselves do it, but in reality, unless they’re in the business of selling ifts, they’re unlikely to have somebody who’s a competent expert. So they’re going to need someone to come and do that for them, basically.
That’s right. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. That’s good. And so from the sounds of it, say for a passenger Lift, that assessment has to be done every six months, but it doesn’t necessarily mean per se that it has to be maintained, although there’s a good chance that it might need something. Is that right?
So from a legislative point of view, you don’t have to kind of physically do something. So if you do have to look at it properly, fill out this detailed assessment at least every six months on a passenger lift, say. Correct.
So basically, if you look this up anywhere online, it’ll say that it’s recommended that your lift be maintained, serviced. within a period of it’ll give you know like six months twelve months whatever they’ll say the requirement falls with the thorough examination but having said that because of the nature of these pieces of equipment maintaining them is key and so in order to you for you to get a successful LOLA thorough examination passed through you would need to be having your lift maintained, otherwise it’s just going to get to the point where it’s the insurance inspector or the law inspector would say, this isn’t being maintained, these items aren’t safe, it needs to go off until it’s been rectified.
So, as you say, very similar to an MOT and a service schedule on a car that we’re all familiar with, you know, and you’ve probably got major services and minor services and oil changes, you know, little things and big things that need to be swapped out or whatever. That’s right, yes.
Right. Okay. Well, that’s really helpful. And I guess that’s a great analogy. And it makes sense. It’s a piece of mechanical equipment. It travels, you know, so why wouldn’t it have the equivalent of an MOT? So what are the things that come up?
You know, what are the most common faults that you find with lifts? And I guess from a point of view of this webinar, you know, how can we prevent those happening in the first place? I think the key thing here with lifts is it’s a very closed off piece of equipment. And so there’s not really much a lift user could do or a lift owner could do in terms of keeping the lift to a degree of maintained without actually having lift maintenance.
So the key thing here would be regular lift maintenance. With lifts, what tends to go first is the doors because they take a lot of knocking. They’re opening and closing all day long. They tend to get nudged quite a bit. There’s sensors on these doors to stop them from closing onto people.
But if you hit them at the right angle, you can dislodge those. And then there’s rollers and there’s things to keep it in tracks to stop it from doing like a cat flap effect. If you were to sort of fall against one of those doors, the last thing you want it to do. It’s kind of cat flap and then you fall down a shaft. And so, yeah, and these things need to be checked regular to make sure that they’re not wearing thin and that they’re all working as they are.
And there’s clearing out those tracks, which anyone can do. You know, you can go there with a vacuum and clean those up and what have you. But again, it really is down to having a lift maintenance company come in and do these things for you and make sure that an actual plan is put in place for certain areas of that scheduled maintenance.
Certain things get looked after and get maintained just to cover themselves really and make sure that, you know, well, to reduce the risk of breakdown really and ultimately accidents. Yes, quite.
And so I guess from what you say, it’s largely a sealed unit effectively. But I guess probably the only thing people can do is have a good cleaning schedule. So you’re not you’re not getting bits of stuff in the track, in the tracks. And, you know, everything’s kind of as clean as it can be.
That’s right. Yeah. Another thing that every time. What you see on TV, a lot of people sometimes, or even in town, if you walk past somebody at a lift and they’re waiting for it to come and they can get quite frustrated with it and start punching that button to try and make sure it comes down to them next. That sort of treatment is detrimental to a lift.
If you’ve pressed that button and it’s not lit up, there is a good chance it’s just that that little illuminator hasn’t worked. I mean, by all means, press it again and make sure that you’ve pressed it. But it’s a bit like a traffic light one. You’ll press it. It might work, but the little illumination thing around it may not be working.
Pressing it repeatedly and getting more and more aggressive with that, it doesn’t change anything. It’s going to work or it’s not going to work. But essentially… It’s how you use those things as well.
So there’s no reason for it. In fact, I think a lot of them are going kind of touch now on more recent equipment. But yeah, pressing things like that aggressively, trying not to nudge into doors. And especially like if it’s in a supermarket with trolleys, what you might find is some places will put like barriers in the way of the two sides of the doors, like poles to stop trolleys from hitting them.
Yeah. So, you know, there are solutions, but again, and I’ll keep saying it over and over, that’s down to sort of like a kind of a risk assessment and to go through with your lift maintenance company.
Sure, but it’s not something that you really want to be tinkering with or could tinker with, you know, unless you’re kind of stupid, right? Yeah, it’s kind of one of those things that you just don’t want. Yeah, I mean, if I was the owner of a building, you know, I absolutely wouldn’t… uh you know you just can’t risk somebody falling down you know it’s it’s both a horrible thing to happen and it’s a pr nightmare as well obviously so, yes um
We’ve just got a couple of people on here. So Sarah Littlewood, I hope you can see what’s going on now. Yeah, so Natalie’s correctly said we can send you this later on. We are recording this. So hopefully, there’s lots of people still on.
So I’m hoping they haven’t. I think they’d have got frustrated by now if it wasn’t working. So hopefully, you can all see this properly.
So thinking about the going back to the kind of the legislative side and so on. So are there any governing bodies or I’m going to have to read this because it’s a long word. So governing bodies or accreditation is commonly associated with Lift companies. So within the Lift industry, there is LEIA, which is Lyft and Escalator Industry Association.
I feel like I’ve passed my driving test every time I get that right. And so they, I think about, there’s about eighty-five to ninety percent subscribed to that. I might be a little bit out with those numbers, I may be a lot out, please don’t quote me. But a lot of Lift companies sort of aim to be to the standard that you would need to be to be a member of LEIA.
So while it’s not sort of an absolute requirement, It is a standard to which we all adhere to. And there is sort of reasons for that in terms of they provide great training for lift engineers and they provide bulletins for safety. And then there are other reasons as well, such as having to have like an ISO 9001 so that you as a company has got a quality management system in place.
And that then essentially helps a customer, a client, understand that, right, they’ve got these things. That means they’ve essentially kind of passed part one of what our need is when we’re making a selection for a supplier. There are other things as well. So we’ve got Chas, we’ve got Safe Contractor, and I think we’ve got Safe… I always get this one wrong. Is it Safe Line or… I’ve got it written down somewhere. Apologies. Don’t ask me. Safe contractor and construction line.
Yeah, I always forget these things. So I always write down terminologies and like the layers and stuff just to make sure I’m not saying it wrong. But yeah, so while they aren’t specific to lift companies, a lot of lift companies do sort of have those. They’re kind of like a good stepping stone for us to have to go to the next step and progress to that layer achievement.
Great. Okay. That’s really helpful. Thank you. So how have things developed really over the last ten years? I mean, is it kind of just a case of, well, let’s go up and down and that’s it? Or, you know, what’s happened in the last ten years? And, you know, technology is moving very fast. You know, what’s on the horizon for the next five years?
This is a really good question. I’ve been in the industry now since two thousand and three, and I’ve seen many, many shifts in that time from the inclusion of drives. We used to sort of work on lifts that are sort of like tracked by magnets in a shaft. We still have that. But now we’ve got encoders telling control panels where they are.
And so in the last ten years, it’s it’s sped along to be honest with you. It’s quite frightening how fast everything sort of sped along. The technology now really helps lift maintenance companies and people, you know, lift owners with their lift in terms of sort of more smart technology. as it were.
And so now where we used to have an understanding of a lift breaking down or starting to wear by looking at a component and saying, this is starting to wear, we can go to a more modern lift now it’ll tell us not only how many runs it’s done in a period but it’ll also tell us how many kilometers that’s worked out at right and you get a general feel for the usage of that lift it can point they can point you in a direction of what is failing what’s you know what what has failed and so you know we’ve kind of got to the point now where or we’re getting to the point now where um the time that we have to spend on site looking for a fault has greatly reduced because the machine itself is actually assisting us a lot more heavily than it used to do.
And in terms of the future, I mean, I think the key words on everybody’s lips at the moment is AI. which is fascinating. I absolutely love AI. And so, you know, for learning and language, the way that we communicate with machines, that’s absolutely changing. And it’s going to be interesting to see how that changes in the future in lifts.
As with augmented reality, you’ve seen it in sort of like medical industries where people are training So with surgical equipment, using augmented reality and having sort of prompts in front of them while they’re working in the real world.
And I think that that is probably going to be quite huge. I mean, it may already be in some other countries, I imagine, who are further forward than us technology wise. But I imagine that that is probably going to be a game changer for us.
So, for example, a maintenance engineer could put on some goggles and look around and see where the fault is behind something because it’s, you know, augmented and something’s flashing on screen, you know, fix here and bring up a video of how to, you know, what the latest way to fix that thing is.
This is it. I mean, at the moment… Yeah, at the minute, what we’ve got is we have technology in our palms on our phones, which is great. And so we can look up PDFs, we can read through manuals, which is absolutely fabulous. But if you had that there and these two hands-free, and you was looking at something and it was giving you a demonstration here on, you know, where to go next and what to move and things like that.
Even a live feed with a technician who’s nowhere near, an engineer could probably, you know, get a little bit more done on his time there. So, yeah, these things are super exciting in the world of lifts to me anyway. This is something to hire.
Yeah, I mean, I think it’s very, very cool. And it’s nice to see use cases for that kind of technology. And especially where you’ve got the sort of higher value static equipment. And, you know, you were saying about the ability of the the list to kind of tell you what’s, you know, to communicate with you as to what’s wrong with it and, you know, what the where is and so on.
And therefore you can, I guess you can do much sort of just in time maintenance. You can say, okay, we’re going to need to get there. It’s not urgent right now, but, probably needs to be looked at in the next month, which is two months ahead of its normal service schedule. And it’s ahead of the LOLA. But actually, if we don’t fix it now, we’re going to have a problem anyway. It’s going to cost and, you know, what have you.
This is just one of the key things that really frustrates me, I think, in today’s society is the phrase it’s not hurting anybody, because I always think to myself, why do we have to wait until it does until it’s a problem? And this is exactly that point you know why are we waiting until we’ve got that problem downtime can be the most expensive part of a lift repair not necessarily the component and the engineer to go and fit that part but if we need to order a part say uh from Spain or you know somewhere in in the EU and they’ve got their summer shutdown uh upcoming.
Knowledge is powering in terms of ordering those early and getting a quote out early and saying, look, this needs to be done. It’s prompted us. Really, we need to be looking at getting this done. And here’s a couple of reasons why.
One of those being it’s got a lead time of four weeks now, but in the summer holidays, that can go up to eight weeks. That would essentially see you out of, if it fails, that’s going to see you out of action for eight, nine weeks. And again, if that’s a hotel and that’s your only lift, that’s going to get you a lot of bad reviews.
Great. Well, look, that’s kind of our first sort of main batch of questions, really. So we’ve rattled through those. You’ve given some great answers. So thank you for that. Were there any, did I miss any others?
Oh, no, I have. I think I’ve missed a couple, actually. So, yeah, so let’s, no, no, I’m fine, I’m fine. Sorry, I’ve misunderstood my own notes. Sorry about that. Okay, so I haven’t had any questions come through. So this is kind of a little more rapid fire, but if you do want to ask a question, feel free to type in a question. You know, you’ve got Craig here, do use him.
So these are a little bit more sort of rapid fire kind of questions. So what’s the typical lifespan of a commercial lift? I would generally expect to get about twenty, twenty-five years out of a lift from installation before looking at having to improve it in any way. That would be my initial life cycle. That’s a well-maintained lift, a not very well-maintained lift.
You could probably get a good ten years off of that and include quite a few call out bills in the meantime. So I know actually you’d sent over some photos, which we haven’t had a chance to look at yet. So in terms of, you know, well-maintained lift and maybe that lifespan, I just wonder if we could bring, I’ll bring those up.
Perhaps you could talk us through, you know, this is a less well-maintained lift. So this is a lift before improving said lift. So as you can see there, it’s essentially a shell. It’s a really old piece of equipment. But the brilliant thing about lifts is, you can get generations out of them if you look after them and if you improve them and upgrade the key components such as control panels that run them.
But obviously moving on to this, this then is kind of refreshing internally as well, which turns it into that’s sort of like halfway through and then eventually brings us to these lovely pictures, a finished product. And you would never in a million years expect. Yeah, exactly.
And you would never in a million years expect that your old piece of equipment that looks a little bit tired, a little bit worn. The worst thing in the world is knowing how much something like that might cost you to install in this day and age. But you can look to improve what you already have at a fraction of that price. And whilst there are key reasons you might want to change to a new lift for compliance with new health and safety requirements, there are also reasons why you might want to stick to your old equipment.
We can make them far more energy efficient. We can make them look like new. but they don’t necessarily have to sort of like rush ahead to, to today’s requirements in terms of, you know, the EN. I think it’s that. And so, you know, obviously you’re improving it, you’re making it safer, but there are certain sort of stipulations that might make it a lot more costly for a new lift to go in than doing this, which I think anybody looking at that would agree pretty much looks like a new lift. yeah yeah and I guess it’s greener and less downtime and and so on I imagine installing a new lift is a pretty big undertaking um quite disruptive potentially uh especially if and they tend to go into places where there’s lots of people so you know if it’s a passenger lift um and therefore you know it’s going to be quite disruptive having all these you know kit being brought in and out and maintenance and and sorry uh Yes.
And if it’s something like a hydraulic lift with a big piston in the middle of a building, you know, getting that out of the building can mean modifications to the building to get that out and get another one in, which is, again, is a huge undertaking. Yeah. I can imagine. So it’s quite a big incentive to do something like this.
Tom’s got a question. It’s greener as well, obviously, renewing. Yeah, yeah. Reduce, reuse, recycle, right? Reusing what you’ve already got makes a lot more sense. Tom’s got a question here.
Could you tell me a little bit about the PTSN switchover and how it affects lifts? So it’s your guess as to what PTSN means. I’m hoping you know. Is that the phones? I think that’s telephones because there is a big switch over to digital, which is essentially turning landlines now to like a, I forget what they’re called now, but, you know, a bit like a mobile phone, essentially.
Our solution to that, if I’m answering the right question, Our solution to that is, at the moment, autodialers, the majority of autodialers in a lift, there’s a requirement, if you’ve got a passenger lift, for you to have two-way communication in the event of an entrapment. If you’ve got an autodialer in there at the moment, it works on a line with a voltage on a copper wire. And so in order to get that to work with the new changeover to digital, You would probably need to get some kind of equipment. I don’t know if there’s equipment out there at the moment to sort of work as a bit of a bridge for that.
What our solution is at the moment, what we’re offering to everybody at the moment, I’m literally putting it on the bottom of all my emails, is for this digital switchover and readiness for it, future-proofing existing equipment with GSM units. The GSM units essentially work as that bridge, but they work over mobile networks. And then we offer a SIM card, which is a roaming SIM card. Not roaming as in you can go to Spain with it. What it means is it will always get the strongest signal.
So, for example, if a particular network goes down for an afternoon, And that is the strongest sort of network that it’s using at the time. It doesn’t go down because of that. It will go to the next strongest signal. I don’t want to use names because I don’t want to get anybody into trouble, but I’m just, you know, it will always bounce to the closest and strongest signal. And that is the solution.
Since the switch over, we’re sort of doing away with, I think, is it three G now? And we’ve changed from twenty eighteen. from just data to data and communication talking. And so since that changeover, mobile signals in buildings and on GSM units have sort of come on leaps and bounds for signal strength. And they’re proving a worthy contender for a solution for this. And that’s what we’re offering people at the moment. Right, great. Thank you.
Tom, I hope that answers your question. You mentioned about insurance. Are lifts a key insurance requirement for buildings in terms of means of escape? So for means of escape, essentially, if it’s a normal lift, you wouldn’t want to jump into a normal lift for escape, especially if it’s sort of like a fire or anything. There are particular lifts for that, which if you’ve got, I think the two listed are… Is it fire evacuation so that the fire crew can come in, switch over to fire mode, and then they can use it for getting equipment up and down.
And they’re rated for a particular amount of time to be able to do so. And then there are evacuation lifts. And both would essentially go and help with your insurance.
So I think I don’t know how many floors it is on a high rise now, but if a building has so many floors, it does need to have a fire lift. I think it’s one fire lift in there. I’d need to check that. There’s so much. I guess it’s less feasible for people to. trail down all the stairs, especially if people are… Yeah, well, this is just it. There are other solutions.
So you’ll find that like some care homes might have, they’ve got like stair climbers and some sort of like, it’s like a device that sits next to the stairs. It looks a bit like a sledge that goes down the stairs as well for evacuating people if they haven’t got a lift that’s suitable. So that needs to be looked at if you’re in one of those environments and you’ve got a lift. you’d need to check and make sure that that is what it was, you know, put in for because these things are sort of to a certain standard to withstand such as fire.
And you certainly don’t want to get stuck in a normal lift because if the power goes out and it’s battery backed up, do you know what I mean? And nobody’s coming to the lift to get anybody out because it should have. What tends to happen with a lift is if the fire alarm goes off, It’ll tell the control panel, the control panel will take it to the bottom floor and then the doors will just stay open and it’ll just stay like that until obviously it’s reset.
Yeah, no, it makes sense. What’s, sorry, I was going to say, what are the financial benefits of proactive lift maintenance? You know, we talked about the sort of stitch in time, but you know, how financially beneficial can that be?
For financially beneficial in fact I think I’ve sent you a couple of pictures um of a lift that hasn’t been maintained for a very very long time and we was asked to go and have a look at it to see that coming up here and as you can see everything has been begrimed everything’s absolutely filthy so nothing’s running as it should be but I think there’s one in particular here and it’s basically it’s got birds nesting in there and what have you now purely because I don’t think I’d be willing to go on that.
Exactly. And so, I mean, and this is exactly why it’s good to sort of work alongside lift companies, you know, with an FM. Because in an instance such as this one, we can’t go in there and work on anything, as you can see. The extremities aren’t uncommon because this happens all the time. It’s not necessarily as bad as this. This is just to demonstrate that. But, you know, birds get into places, rats get into places. And then once that happens, running and yeah, exactly. And it’s lovely for them.
And it’s a nice little environment. But what happens then is we’ve got the waste of those. So we need to have a company come in and deal with that before we can do anything. And this is purely because, you know, if you’re not looking at an area, It’s like anything else. If you don’t open a cupboard for quite a bit and then you open it up, there’s a good chance there’s going to be a cobweb there. And it’s just like that.
If you’re not going to go into these areas and get them maintained, this can happen. And the offshoot of that is lift failure. Things start to heat up if they’re covered up. And heat is energy. So you’ve got energy wastage. And then you’ve got the expense of clearing it all out and then repairing anything that needs to be repaired. And all of that adds more delay, right?
So your lifts stop working and then you can’t get, so you’ve then got to get a PESC person in to, you know, before you even start looking at the lift, right? And that might take a few days and… This is just it. And for a lot of people, that’s a headache. If somebody’s managing a building and they have to deal with this, it isn’t just a case of, right, I’ve got A to come and fix it and I’ve got B to come and clear it out.
Coordinating that for access and things, this is all such a headache for an end user. to be dealing with and this is what I say about it being sort of like a perfect example really for for folks to come to such as Robinson’s so that this kind of stuff gets handled all in-house um and you know and managed so that that you don’t have to you don’t have to deal with two different companies we do pest control and we do this right so yeah exactly exactly um what are some of the common indicators that a lift needs an upgrade.
So usually with a lift, what tends to happen is over time, you’ll notice it’s just the small things. Initially you’ll notice that it might be running a bit slower. Uh, things might start sticking. You you’ll find that, um, you’ll have a lot more breakdowns to them. And when that starts to happen, you might need to start replacing components. And then the telltale sign is when you get told by a supplier that it’s harder to get to these things because they’re not stocking them anymore and they have to ship it in from wherever. And then eventually that turns into, sorry, they’re not being made anymore.
And so if you’ve kind of let it get to that point, you’ve probably gone a little bit too far if your lift’s failed. If you get into the point where you’ve sort of like noticing these things, it’s always good at that point to start talking to your live maintenance provider and saying, look, we’re having these repeat issues with it. It seems to be the same things. It’s just getting worse. The frequency of these call outs, it’s all about managing those, monitoring them. and communication really. And then if you sort of like have those conversations with your maintenance provider and your LOLA certificate will sort of indicate this as well. So once you’ve got your Lola through that generally will put on it as, you know, at the end as an observation that the lift doesn’t meet with certain requirements now or they might word it as, it’s showing where and consideration should be given for an upgrade of a control panel.
And so there are numerous ways of it, but there’s a lot of communication throughout the process of having a lift from just receiving your service sheets to, like I said, the law, the reports, and then picking up the phone and just having a general chat with somebody at the lift company and seeing what, you know, what the problems are and how we go about resolving them. It’s not always bad news. It’s not always you need a new control panel. Yeah. But that being there as an option is good because it’s kind of reassuring to the end user that it’s not a write-off.
Yeah. So let’s say I’ve had a bit of a nightmare. I haven’t managed to make it through the next maintenance and the lift’s broken down. I’m a property manager. I’ve got this lift that doesn’t work. What should I do? So if the lift’s broken down, there’s a couple of things that need to happen. If it’s broken down the first thing you would want to do is make sure that if it’s a passenger carrying one that there’s nobody in it – entrapments are dealt with by lift companies different to how they’re dealt with um you know just a generic uh breakdown so a four eight hour call out becomes a we’ll try and get there within the hour call out because we need to free somebody so the first part of call would be make sure that there’s nobody stuck in the lift and then it gets straight onto the phone to the lift company about that. I would always say, try and keep the lift as it is. Don’t sort of like try and force anything.
Don’t try and get any doors open or be pressing any buttons and what have you. Because we always like to find the lift, how it broke down at that point. Going back to what I was saying before about equipment, more modern equipment, giving indicators as to what the problem is with the lift.
Unfortunately, the majority of the lifts that are in buildings at the moment aren’t equipped with such technology. And so to speed up our engineers’ time on site, obviously because you’re getting billed per hour for it, you don’t want them there all day looking for something. So if we leave the lift exactly as it is, explain clearly what the problem was, what happened, were there any noises or anything like that?
Speak to the person who noticed it, get that information and relay that to the lift company. And obviously, like I said, just wait then until they come and make their assessment. Obviously, as well, making sure that everything is safe. So if there are doors or anything like that open, you want to make sure that everything’s covered up and people aren’t just walking by and what have you. Yeah. Yeah, obviously. Yeah, that makes sense.
And that gathering that information is interesting as well, you know, so that helps the diagnosis as well. And like, don’t touch it because, you know, that will give you some, the lift engineer, some clues as to what happens. Yeah, that’s it. You would never drop your car off at a garage and say, there you go, fix it. You’d tell them what the problem was initially. And if you’d heard something and if there was a rattle, you want to point them in that direction. It’s exactly the same with a lift engineer.
Sure. No, that’s helpful, thank you. So what are the legal implications of not maintaining your lift properly? So with not maintaining lifts properly, it comes down to essentially, you legally do have to have your LOLA inspection anyway. So if you were having that, they would be telling you you need to have certain criteria in place and sort of making sure that compliance were being met.
If compliance isn’t met, and you’re running a lift without these things, or it’s not just generally being serviced, What can happen is if you have somebody with such a simple thing that’s just tripping on the way into a lift, I mentioned sensors on the door earlier. If those sensors don’t stop a door in time and it impacts an elderly person, say in a nursing home, it has quite some force there and it can bruise.
I’ve actually known doors knock people off the feet before, not wanting to scare anybody, but it can happen. And if that happens, usually somebody is going to get hurt. And it’s at that point when those people then may want to come back and get some kind of financial compensation for that.
And that unfortunately then comes down to the Lift owner. And so you would want to make sure that your lift is being maintained and looked after as much as you can to prevent that. Because as long as you’re being seen to do that and you are doing everything and that was just an accident, then that’s what it is. And so it negates that blame a little bit because you are being seen to do all you can.
Accidents unfortunately do happen. But if an accident happens and you aren’t doing these things, then obviously that’s going to not look very good for you. It doesn’t look good in court, does it? It doesn’t look good in court. It doesn’t, no. And that’s when the wallet has to open, unfortunately. Yeah. Yes. Yeah, I’m sure. Yeah. Yeah. Look, brilliant. Thank you so much, Craig. I’ve learned a lot about lifts. I hope you’ve all found it really useful. If today’s session has raised any questions for you, then do get in touch with us.
The details are on the screen below. We are running a number of these seminars, so webinars, so do watch out for the next one. But for now, I just want to say a big thank you for joining us today, Craig. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Cool. And thank you all for watching and do check out. We’ve got loads of information on the website. There’s a video about lift maintenance as well. And we just have a question. Somebody pinged there. So, yeah, thank you all for joining and do join us. Do join us next time. Cheers. Thank you. Bye. Bye.
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