My Mum and Dad are building a new house, smaller and more suited to their future needs than their current house. To this end they have considered fitting a lift so that if they become less mobile they shouldn't have to move again. So far they have had one quote - £14k + vat! (actually thats a bit odd coz it's a new build) This is totally out of the question, so does anyone in the group have any idea of a supplier who might be a more reasonable cost, it's only for a one story house. Anyone have any experience?
I suggested that but my Mum is keen on having a spiral staircase and doesn't like stairlifts. I think they might go for a more conventional staircase and allow for that option if a lift proper is economically silly.
It seems to me that the lifts are very expensive because of low demand and the (quite right) safety regs. Oh and the fact that on the whole the only people asking are older people who might have ready cash to spare and be easily bamboozled by sales - not my Mum and Dad :-)
The 1 storey lift for our office was a bit over £10k About a four foot square platform with only one side (so you can't lean on the front back or other side as it travels past the fixed wall panels) Fully interlocked unpowered single doors which at 4' across are nigh on impossible to pull toward yourself if sat in a wheelchair attempting to get in. But good for shifting filing cabinets.
Having seen the cost of having to maintain one, 14 to fit new doesn't seem unreasonably high to me.
If you can't afford that to have it built, you won't want to afford the
2K bills each and every year to have it serviced and to have "this little piece here that's only very slightly worn replaced or you won't get your safty cert which you need to operate it". Ok, you probably don't need the safty cert for a domestic operation, but you have to be mad not to get it serviced to a similar standard
It was a newly built office about 4 years back. Put in because we had to, along with a whole load of other things that make the building regs inspections for domestic properties seem almost pleasurable. It was the most cost effective one we could lay our hands on. Most daft was the manual winder - you had to stand on a chair right next to the stairwell to reach it, but that was OK.
I would assume a domestic installation would be a bit more flexible and a touch cheaper but it seems vertical lifts outprice stairlifts by quite a hefty margin.
"Toby" wrote | The 1 storey lift for our office was a bit over £10k | About a four foot square platform with only one side (so you can't | lean on the front back or other side as it travels past the fixed | wall panels)
Open lift cars in a smooth walled shaft are allowed under certain commercial uses.
"Sam" wrote | My Mum and Dad are building a new house, smaller and more suited to | their future needs than their current house. To this end they have | considered fitting a lift so that if they become less mobile they | shouldn't have to move again. So far they have had one quote - | £14k + vat! (actually thats a bit odd coz it's a new build)
The lift supplier (along with all others) will add VAT to their invoices. At the end of the new build Ma'n'Pa add up all the VAT they've paid on all the invoices and send a nice letter to the VATman asking for a cheque back. Ma'n'Pa will have to pay out the VAT to the supplier to start off with. And not everything is allowable for VAT reclaim (I think shelving and railing an alcove to make a wardrobe is allowable, but fitted kitchen units aren't, eg.)
| This is totally out of the question, so does anyone in the group have | any idea of a supplier who might be a more reasonable cost, it's only | for a one story house. Anyone have any experience?
Are the lift manufacturers quoting for a self-supporting lift (which basically only needs a hole in the floor) or a lift to be fitted into a structural lift shaft? Obviously, a trade-off between decreasing the cost of the lift and increasing the cost of the building.
Bear in mind that a stairlift may be cheaper but can be difficult for someone to transfer to/from the lift from a wheelchair unaided. They might be better simply considering a downstairs shower room and a downstairs room (eg study or dining room) that could at a later date be used as a bedroom if needs be.
Also bear in mind that for maximum ease of access the lift either needs to be big enough for a wheelchair to turn around inside the car, or have doors on opposite sides for either floor, so a wheelchair can wheel straight in on one floor and wheel straight out on the other. It's not desirable (and might not be permitted) for a wheelchair user to have to 'reverse out' of a lift car.
You might get some useful free advice from a Social Work Occupational Therapist at your local council.
A three floor document lift in my office cost us £20k 20 years ago. It was about three feet by four feet and five feet tall. It was a bit of a beast. All that paper weighs a lot. A passenger lift for £14k sounds like a bargain. VAT or no VAT.
Even if we were ripped off then, we probably were, I was not the buyer, £14k sounds cheap.
Yes that struck me as one option, if 10k is out of the question. I've seen some pre-war lifts still in use, but I'm sure one could get something a fair bit more modern than that.
Its also possible to DIY low rise lifts if you understand the safety issues.
The problem with fitting old used lifts or diying is that if you fit them for someone else, or someone else rides in them, youre putting yourself in a bit of a position legally. Understandably the law is very interested in passenger lifts, and things of the past are unlikely to meet all the latest safety standards.
One thing I'd look into if I were in your position is a lift-stair-lift crossbreed. I dont know the proper name, but its a flat platform that goes up the stairs rather than a chair, so it behaves to some extent like a conventional lift.
Failing that theres always the old chain and pulley for £50 ;)
My father's secondhand lift came from (and was fitted by) a firm which advertised itself in National newspapers and magazines as specialising in lifts for the mobility-impaired. The responsibility to make sure everything is sound is theirs. I suppose this makes my post (strictly speaking) off-topic, but I also would have thought this was not a DIY job.
I, too, have considered a lift for some point in the future. I certainly don't like staircase lifts at all, yuk.
But if a lift costs £14k I should have thought any small-ish engineering firm could manufacture one for a fraction of that. Consider: Four steel runners to contain the "cage"; the cage itself, suggest space-frame technology with ply or mdf walls; the lifting device, probably ratchet and pinion, and a safety device. These items are the kinds of things many engineering workshops could make up in a few weeks from scratch. £5,000 would sound like a reasonable figure to me. Given that it's new build, access to install the lift should not be a problem. Alternatively, contact some companies in Germany! They know how to do a good job and they don't tend to rip one off quite so much. For them it would be a doddle to hop on the ferry and bring the complete kit over here.
What about paternosters? At the Cologne Volkshochschule they had these installed for students and lecturers. There are no doors. The front of these lifts is completely open and the lift never stops. You simply jump on and off when the cabin you're in gets to the floor you want. It was a bit hairy if you stayed in at the top because the cabins kind of went "over the top" so to speak in order to come down the other side. I don't recall there ever being any reported injuries. It was just a device that seemed strange the first time one encountered it, but became normal once one had gained a bit of practice in judging the right moment to step on or alight.
Not a DIY job for most people, but not an impossible task by any means for a competent engineer who can read a drawing, weld, braze, turn and fit. Look at the lift like a one-drawer office filing cabinet on its side (so that the drawer opens vertically). Basically, I would see four runners to guide and locate the wheels of the cage, a rack and pinion to move the cage up or down, and a safety device. The runners would need to be very firmly based on the foundations of the building (i.e. the weight not carried by the building walls themselves) and attached to the building fairly flexibly to allow slight movement like ground settlement. I would say steel channel runners with a 5 mm wall thickness and of the dimensions 80 mm x 50 mm (i.e. 80 mm depth into channel and 50 mm width) would suffice to give high strength for manhandling one person and chair. The cage itself would be of welded or brazed square tubular sections with T bars 80 mm x 50 mm underneath to locate, via guide wheels, into the channels. The cage walls and floor would be constructed from ply or mdf. As for the safety device, one lift for public access I saw once simply had a very large coil spring at the bottom of the shaft! It's not like the lift is going to fall very far or fast from the first floor in a domestic property! In fact, my earlier estimate of £5,000 would probably be somewhat on the high side.
Also, please let no one be bamboozled by the authorities as to building/safety regs and the ability of anyone to follow and comply with them. The regs are published. If the finished product complies with them *to the letter*, there is no possible reason for the authorities to deny certification. Obviously this means having the ability at one's disposal to x-ray inspect sample welds and so on.
As the greying of the population increases, there may be more call for small domestic lifts, so an enterprising company might well find it a lucrative business to be getting into. After all, they'd only have to undercut the £14,000 jobbie by a grand and they'd get the work.
If I had a lift right now, my job of moving would have been made a lot simpler, even though I do not need a lift to get upstairs myself. But all the "stuff" in the loft and in the upstairs rooms could have been moved downstairs far more easily with a lift available! It would be a design requirement in any house I built myself, even if I were still in my thirties. By the way, the easiest way to get stuff you don't want from the first floor to the ground floor is to chuck it out of the window on to the lawn. I saved myself dozens of trips up and down the stairs by that method.
I remember them at the Bristol Co-op in the 1960's and (for staff only) at the West Middlesex Hospital more recently but I thought they were now banned.
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