I see that Aldi are selling an electric cable hoist for £50
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anyone bought one and how good are they?
This might sound daft but here goes anyway: could you mount one above you loft trap door and use it to raise or lower heavy boxes?
The description says that it can lift 250kg but surely it has to be bolted to something substantial to do that? Obviously I won't be lifting 250kg into my loft but what size timber would I have to bolt it to, to be able to lift boxes safely?
What do you mechanics bolt it to when lifting gearboxes and engines?
electric winch has much more pizzazz !! Has definitely much more of the 'big-boy toy' buzz to it. Rather than "come and see my etchings", it would be "come and see my attic winch" - definitely one up on the Jones's.
On a more practical note, I've got several multi bush pulley systems - a couple of bike hangers and a hanger for the MX5 hardtop, and I find them a PIA and wouldn't like to have to use them frequently. There is a large amount of cord required for the mechanical advantage, which gets everywhere and tangles, and there is a tendency for it to come off one or another of the pulleys.
========================================= I think this would be a bit of overkill for your purpose. The weight of the hoist itself would probably put a bit of a strain on your roofing and / or ceiling timbers. Garages use either a dedicated floor-standing engine hoist or a hoist attached to a heavy overhead steel girder.
The item suggested by another poster (pcb1962), which looks very much like an old 'Haltrac' engine hoist, would be more than adequate for lifting but you would need to ensure that there is sufficient headroom for the hoist and the boxes and this means hanging the hoist of roofing rafters which are not really intended to take this kind of loading.
I don't have one, but by lunchtime I ought to. Similar kit is =A390 at Machine Mart etc.
No idea what I want it for though - thought I did have a real use for it, but then realised it's 240V only, not 110V.
125kg in a straight lift. 250kg is if the cable is doubled back through the (supplied) pulley on the hook. Be warned that these simple hoists get a lot fussier about their cable lay onto the reel if you do this, so I'd advise against it unless essential.
Obviously. However you don't need 250kg of capacity if you're only using it as a convenience for things weighing under 50kg. Your roof structure (if it's an old house) is likely to handle this quite easily if you can arrange some form of shackle over a bolt through a rafter. If it's a more modern truss made of lolly-sticks and nail plates, then you'll need to arrange some sort of spreader to span the load across a number of them. Any solution relying on woodscrews is unlikely to be a good trustworthy one! It may even be better to use webbing straps over the structure, rather than fastening rigidly.
Remember that this _is_ lifting gear you're building here. You'll kill people if you drop it on your head, even just the hoist itself. It's not a product I'd have wanted to sell myself - how many Aldi shoppers really need such a thing, or have the wit to use it without injury? Remember that we're in a country that has killed something like four small children in the last couple of months through "TV related accidents" and a toppling fireplace or two.
On the whole there are few heavy things I'd want to put into a loft, certainly for "storage" rather than building work. Loft floors aren't usually intended for heavy storage. The only time I've bothered to do this myself I've just set up a simple gin pulley - the weight I was happy to put up there in one piece was no more than I could lift myself with a straight pull.
It's about the same as two hamsters in a wheel. I did think twice about this when I saw one in the shop - it's half the mass of the last similar one I used (Machine Mart), even though it claims the same capacity.
Nor will I be hanging 250kg off the attachment bracketry that comes as standard!
Haltracs were nicely made and still worth grabbing if you spot a real one on eBay. However they also had very little lifting height capacity (with a finite amount of cordage), owing to the number of pulleys used. OK for short lifts of engines, but not for moving loads between floors.
The reason I never liked Haltracs for lifting engines was the restoring torque of so many cords when you rotated the hook. My hydraulic engine crane has a swivelling hook on the end of the jib and it sits where you leave it. Fiddling an engine & gearbox around to get it out with a Haltrac had a nasty tendency to swing right back and trap fingers.
Not familiar with that brand. Generally these things work fine but are very noisy.
absolutely
If you've no substantial timber in the right place, you can make a trapezoid timber frame so the floor takes the weight over several joists. Think about the eimber joints though, the wrong type of joint could see it split, dropping something on someone;'s head, and potentially ending their life.
If you store stuff up there, these things are a boon. A bit OTT perhaps, but they do make a hard job easy.
Agreed - I've had one for 30-odd years, and still use it occasionally. The worst part is extending one ready to use. There's so much friction that you have to tug very hard on the hook at the same time as feeding the rope round the sheaves and holding the self-locking thingy.
I tend to use mine now more as an auxiliary hoist to tilt an engine when it's on the engine crane or for pulling horizontally - when the ropes are even more likely to tangle.
Thank you for your reply. I haven't been to the shop to see one in real life, so I hadn't appreciated that it would be so heavy. To reassure people, I have no intention of lifting 250kg objects into my loft. I would think that you could only comfortably carry twenty-something kilos in a box and even then you would need a strong box to make sure the bottom doesn't fall out.
The idea of the hoist wasn't because of the weight, it was more because it can be tricky climbing a ladder and carrying a box at the same time or leaning through the hatch as someone passes something up. I guess I'll have to thinks some more. Even so, I think the price is good, even Toolstation's silverline hoist is£75ish IIRC.
I thought I heard the figure of 25kg per square metre for loft loading; possibly on this group? But I don't know what size joists that is based on. I know the joists in my loft are certainly a fraction (a third? a quarter?) of the size of the ones under my floorboards.
That said, there is the water tank which I guess holds 200 litres, though that's shared over three or four joists.
How would you reinforce joists? I imagine you would have to hire a crane to lift thicker joists and remove bricks to slide them in across the span of the house? Not something practical or affordable for most people.
I was thinking of screwing some wood on top of the joists to increase the depth, so that I could put more insulation down and then board across the top. I appreciate that this won't increase capacity because I won't be adding the wood all the way across but in terms of allowing me to board over insulation, would this work?
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