5 Essential Safety Standards for Installing Lifts in Residential Properties

Adding a residential elevator should be made hassle-free and as safe as possible. Such a complex and long-term investment in your home should provide improved quality of life and peace of mind. The entire family should confidently and freely enjoy the entire house and its surroundings, with safe access to all levels of the family home.

1. EN 81-41 – The Benchmark For Residential Platform Lifts

EN 81-41 refers to the European safety standard applicable to vertical lifting platforms installed in domestic and semi-public buildings. This is the standard that should be applied to your home lift, with no exceptions, so how does EN 81-41 make sure your new lift operates safely?

Two things in particular, established by EN 81-41, are worth attention. First of all, “Hold-to-run” controls: in an open platform lift where there’s no enclosure but space between the floor, walls, and ceiling of the car, the lift will only move as long as the user is pressing the button. Let go and the lift stops. Second, a travel speed limit for an unenclosed platform of 0.15 m/s. That’s deliberately slow, slow enough for someone to get out of the way if something goes wrong, or for the mechanism to be stopped mid-cycle.

2. Structural Integrity – The Floor and Aperture Requirements

A home lift redistributes weight onto a minimal floor area. The floor directly under the lift, and every other floor the lift goes through, no matter how many levels, is loaded in a way that typical residential floors aren’t. That concentrated load must be supported by the structure below, and that includes the footprint on each floor plate, which means the shaft, presuming it’s more than a dumbwaiter in a hole in the ceiling, has to have been added into the original home design and may require substantial reworking if it wasn’t.

The shaft had better be close to perfectly spec’d too. A half a centimeter out of true over seven or eight feet is a lot of complexity for a door or gate that has to slide open without resistance for safety.

The minimum loading guidelines for a shaft are just not an item to be approached through guesswork. Working with specialists like Alliance Platform Lifts means you can have them certify that the shaft build and the installation are to their spec, in writing, before they’re too far gone to help sort it out.

3. Battery Backup Systems Need to do More Than Keep the Lights on

It’s all well and good having a backup battery for your lift, but if it isn’t powerful enough for the task at hand then it’s simply not going to work. Believe it or not, a power cut during a trip in a lift is a relatively common occurrence. An emergency light may make the passenger feel better, but it’s not going to get them out of there.

A compliant battery backup system should do three things: power an emergency dialler so the user can call for help, return the lift to ground level under its own power, and hold enough charge to complete that sequence reliably.

4. Perimeter Sensors and Safety Bellows

70% of lift related accidents happen at the point of entry or exit. That’s what the Mitsubishi Electric Quality & Safety Report tells us, and it’s a number that should inform our approach to lift bases on descent.

Safety bellows: what they’re calling the flexible pressure sensors running around the edge of the platform’s lower edge shut down lift power immediately if they sense resistance as it moves downwards. Full height light curtains do the same thing in a vertical direction, bringing the lift to a halt if anything passes through the infrared beam on the way down. One stops the lift if there’s something that isn’t fully clear of the path, the other if there’s something smaller than a hand’s breadth: an object, a child, a pet.

The non-slip flooring on the platform itself deals with the other end of that risk window. Entry and exit are where the falls take place, and a compliant surface spec is an easy fix.

5. Working With the Right Installer From the Start

All of these standards are meaningless if the fit is poor. If a supplier doesn’t guarantee the first installation works for your needs and your home and stand by that with prompt, tidy, maintenance, and repair work, you may as well save the cash and not bother upgrading your specifications.

Getting it Right the First Time

A residential elevator is an investment for the long term. If installed properly, it increases the value of a building by making it more usable for individuals of all ages. But if installed incorrectly, it can become a burden that’s costly to fix and unsafe to use. Elevator standards are developed in response to real accidents. Following them isn’t simply checking the box; it’s the only way to do this job.