Passenger lifts

Residential buildings most often use 400-630 kg lifts. If there is one lift per entrance, 630 kg is chosen - that car takes a pram. For multi-storey buildings the codes require one of the lifts to have a car suitable for carrying a person on a stretcher - the exact rated load and car depth are set by the current DBN (Ukrainian building code).

Installing one passenger lift in a finished shaft takes roughly 2-4 weeks, depending on the number of stops. Including equipment supply, the total time from order to commissioning is usually 3-5 months.

At a minimum: the clear width and depth of the shaft, the travel, the number and position of stops, the pit depth and the distance from the top landing to the slab above the shaft (headroom). We also need to know which sides the car is entered from and whether a through-type car is required. With this set of data we offer specific equipment options, not a price range.

Sometimes yes, sometimes no - it depends on how much space there was around the old car and where the counterweight runs. European manufacturers have product ranges for refurbishment: a more compact traction machine, a different counterweight position, smaller installation clearances. The site survey decides - a tape measure is more accurate here than a forty-year-old archive drawing.

For new builds, usually machine-room-less: no structure is needed above the shaft, the building is lower and energy consumption is lower. When replacing a lift in an older building, it often pays to keep the existing machine room - it is already built, and repairing the traction machine there is easier and cheaper than getting it out from under the shaft ceiling.

The number is determined by a traffic analysis: floor occupancy, number of storeys and the acceptable interval between departures at peak times. The codes set the minimum: one of the lifts must have a car suitable for carrying a person on a stretcher. But the minimum is not the same as comfort: where an entrance has a single lift, any repair brings the whole entrance to a standstill.

Three things: the drive type, the tuning of the variable frequency drive, and isolating the equipment from the building structure. A gearless traction machine is quieter in itself, but if its mounting beam is bolted straight to the floor slab without vibration isolation, the hum will travel through the walls. That is why noise issues are solved during installation, not by replacing the lift later.