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Contrary to popular belief - not every passenger lift is a home lift. Passenger lifts are categorized into - commercial lifts & home lifts. Commercial lifts are meant for high-rise buildings and commercial establishments, to move a large number of people across multiple levels and often comes with a set of ‘’do’s & don’ts’’ for elderly & kids. Whereas, a home lift is supposed to be especially made and designed for private residences, keeping in mind accessibility requirements of kids & elderly family members. Starting from basics, a home lift can be identified by the following - 1. No pit (or a small step) 2. No machine room; headroom not exceeding finished floor level to ceiling on top floor. 3. Customized to suit compact spaces. Brick or RCC shafts, not mandatory, can be installed in a metallic structure too. 4. Single phase operation; low power consumption 5. No ‘’do’s & don’t’’ / supervision required for family members 6. Complies to a defined set of standards and regulations. For example – US follows ASME codes for lifts, while European manufacturers follow Machinery directives/Lift Directives & EN codes, Japanese lifts comply with Building Standard Law of Japan & JIS. Unfortunately, in India, we are yet to have any specific set of standards for home lifts. Read this - Elevator makers lobby for national safety standards amid rising accidents 7. Low on maintenance, shouldn’t need more than 2–3 periodic inspections in a year 8. No license required 9. Not solely dependent on ARD to evacuate family members in case of an emergency (Trap Door mandatory, no AC supply inside the shaft) Speaking of choice of technology, a home lift can either be hydraulic or electric (gear-less). Subject to the site requirements like no. of landings, speed required, capacity, space availability etc., one can opt for any of the two technologies. Vacuum technology is not highly recommended due to low capacity, high noise levels & travel constraints, whereas Screw-nut technology is a ‘no’ due to high noise levels, wear-tear (high on maintenance), complicated installation process and slow speed (especially if there are 4–5 or more landings). In most houses, a home lift is installed to assist family members in mobility, and is expected to be a long-term investment. So, referring to the above checklist is crucial (unless you’re okay with replacing the home lift, every once in a while). To top it all, safety is a crucial element which should play a pivotal role in your decision.
Things to remember when deciding on your home lift: 1. Reliability: The purpose of the home lift is to move between floors and you rely on technology to carry human lives. Hence, you should be relaxed at all times and feel that my home lift will always be moving. 2. Safety: In a country like India where lift accidents are second highest in the world, we cannot avoid the aspect of safety at all. Make sure your home lift is following the highest safety standards. Be alert as even established names take advantage of Indian laws and have launched models without home lift standards. These are usually rebranded commercial lifts designed for high rise buildings and there are many ways to find out what is being pushed on you. Make sure it is a home lift. Demand to know the standards, safety codes & compliance they follow and research if the codes are relevant to a home lift (don’t fall for ISO or ISI since they have no codes for machinery). There are cases where some companies are self-certified and misleading. 3. If possible, travel and meet your dealer at his office. This will make you realize how well organized and established they are. Better still, when you are ready and feel that you are about to make the purchase, call your executive to your location and meet them. Meeting will allow you to judge the professionalism of your seller. This is important as they will be assisting you for the rest of a few decades to keep you elevating with happiness. 4. After sales service: Just like in all other products, after-sales services matter a lot. Some companies will claim we have offices everywhere but sheer number of offices doesn’t help much. For example, this is the reason why we have a company like Nokia with the highest number of service centers in India disappearing in a very short time. The product itself was not competitive in its later years and though there was a service center to initiate the complaints, the downtime of the phone was about a week. Today iPhones with hardly any service center have picked up heavily in the market and the reason is that the product itself is good. 5. Home Lift is an investment that will move your family every day. Get the safest one. 6. Price is an important factor but try to understand why a price is designed in such a way. Understand the value that you will derive from it. For example: Marginal increase in price gives ABS and Airbags in some cars. These two are directly responsible for saving lives worldwide. Home Lifts are not very different and travel vertically, hence search for value additions and safety standards in your home lifts also.
Modern day housing requirements have evolved and smart homes are trending. So, planning one’s house in a smart manner is essential. Points to consider would be - Space Optimization - Every inch matters when building a home and buyers should avoid a generalized passenger (or commercial) lift which has a fixed size & infrastructural requirements; made to retrofit in a private home. For example - If a nuclear family actually needs a compact lift to be built within as little space as possible, it makes no sense for them to build a shaft of say 5 x 5 ft or more to accommodate a passenger elevator. Why would one buy a minivan if one needs a hatchback? Look for specific home lifts manufacturers who will custom build a lift for you. Home lifts by manufacturers of repute, can be installed in as small as 3.5 x 3.5 ft shafts too. This will stand in good stead if you intend to cut down on wasting area & construction spend. Building shaft - So many homeowners fall for this trap. A pit or an extended headroom (machine room is ancient history now) is an absolute non-necessity for a home lift. It can start from (almost) your finished floor level and home lifts with 2450 mm headroom are also available now. Avail expert assistance when you begin constructing the shaft, that will help you to place conduit & all necessary electrical points beforehand, so that you don’t have to redo the plastering later on. ‘Vaastu Shastra’ (only if you believe in it) also plays a vital role in modern day housing and it strongly condemns digging in the ground or positioning the home lift at just any random location, later on. Safety - Home lift is similar to a car, meant to vertically transport your family. Ensure to invest time to evaluate relevant safety standards & features offered by different manufacturers. While ‘Cheap & Best’ may sound music to ears - it is a myth ; please think - if it’s cheap it can’t have the best of specifications & if it’s best it doesn’t need to be cheap. Look for value for money, consider the recurring operational & maintenance cost and then decide. It would be smart to undertake some research beforehand and shortlist manufacturers who do home lifts as a separate category (and not fall for rebranded commercial lifts). That way you know the requisites from the beginning.
This is one of the most common questions which homeowners (new construction) have to ask. The best time to choose a home lift is probably while you are at the planning stage. You must be curious to know why, as you might have a year or more to complete your house? Well, read below on why you should not do the same mistake which more than 60% of the home owners do – 1. Home Lift is not just a machine to move your family up & down, they are much more. Home lifts are customized mobility solutions for kids & elderly people in the family. It’s almost like a car, a vertical transporter for your family across the home, isn’t it? When you don’t buy a car for your family without due diligence, then why buy a home lift without proper research? 2. When you start early, you have all the time for your research without having to rush into taking a decision towards the end. Please be advised that choosing a home lift is no mean task! This involves a detailed research, comparison between available options, analysis of what’s relevant & what’s not, what is mandatory & what could be optional, compatibility, recurring costs etc. Did you know, unfortunately in India, we don’t have any set standards for home lifts in BIS or ISI, because of which a lot of consumers end up falling for non-certified players, resulting in trouble/hassles, worse even accidents! Read here - Elevator makers lobby for national safety standards amid rising accidents 3. Home lifts are supposed to transport human lives and so it would be smart for a consumer to know more about the safety aspects involved in it. A home lift should comply with LD 2014–33 EU; 2014–33 EC, MD 2006/EC/42 & EN 81-41 (which covers 194 safety parameters) - to ensure absolute reliability. More importantly it should carry a 3rd party certification. 4. Surprisingly, quite a lot of architects and housing consultants, developers are still not aware that home lifts are customized solutions, wherein the lifts can be designed according to a particular family’s requirements starting as small as 3.5 ft x 3.5 ft, with no pit & machine room required. This ignorance often costs dearly to homeowners who end up provisioning for a conventional lift instead, wasting a lot of area which is not required at all. Imagine you have a family of 5 members, then why would you make a shaft of 5 ft x 5 ft or more, when you will never have all the family members travel together in the lift? Remember you are paying for every square mm at your house! 5. Integrating the lift area with specific dimensions, in your floor plans, ensures smooth progress in construction and gives you peace of mind, instead of staying confused throughout and then deciding hastily later on, which may not be beneficial in the longer term. When you pass over the drawings of the lift to your architect/project manager, he knows exactly what is to be executed. This also ensures that you don’t have to undertake any changes later on, which could be both time-consuming as well as an expensive affair. 6. The Home lifts market in India although growing is still small in volume for global players to manufacture it here in India. For this reason primarily, a home lift has to be imported from the country of origin (for the manufacturer you choose); and it's worth mentioning that booking the lift early, lets you have the flexibility of confirming the order with only a small token advance and not the entire booking amount. This way you can also plan your finances well. Since home lifts are completely manufactured abroad and then imported to India, the cost tends to revise almost every year with slight increase every time. Booking the lift early, will ensure that you are freezing the cost of your home lift with the manufacturer, irrespective of your delivery timeline being 1 or more years away also.
To answer this completely, let us first narrow down options available with a home owner in India, for home lifts. They could be - 1. Imported Lifts - These are manufactured in compliance to international standards of safety & quality and fully built in the country of origin and then imported. Only plug & play in India. Example - Thyssenkrupp (H 200 & H 300), Kleemann (Maison & Atlas), Mitsubishi (Series SVC/SED). 2. Passenger (Commercial) Lifts - Lifts manufactured in India, focused on high capacity and operation in mid & high rise commercial buildings like malls, offices apartments etc., with single level safety features, rebranded and retrofitted in a private residence. Example - Schindler, Otis, Kone, Johnson 3. Local Lifts - These are manufactured in India with application of local mechanism & engineering. Most companies source components from different OEMs and assemble a lift. For obvious reasons, they’re least likely to follow any defined set of standards for quality and safety. Example - Teknix, ECE, Escon, Omega and many more. Though there are varied technologies available for lifts like - Hydraulic, Electric, Vacuum, Screw & Nut etc.. Hydraulic & Electric (Traction/Gearless) are the 2 most dominant & successful options for a lift application in a private residence, for various reasons. Moving further, to the tentative cost of all the above options, for their entry level solutions - 1. Local Lifts could start from 4 lac and go up to 8 lac for say a G+2 residence for example. . 2. Passenger (Commercial) lifts would begin from 8 lac and based on specifications could go up to 10-11 lac for application in a G+2 residence for example. 3. Imported lifts complying to the highest level of safety standards and workmanship, are available from 16 lac onward, in India now. It is to be noted that above figures are for the cabin & mechanism (barring local players). Further, other costs like logistics, installation, taxes etc. could be additional. Although, most companies now-a-days offer an all inclusive quote. While that has its own advantage of simplifying the final cost to a buyer, that may not be the most ethical way, since the AMC would be calculated on the final cost which in such cases, will also include one-time components like logistics, installation & taxes on which a buyer has to pay additional AMC charges on a recurring basis. Interestingly, although elevator accidents are on a rising spree in India, we are yet to have stringent home lift standards in India. This is the reason why local manufacturers are able to bypass necessary elements, avoid certifications & compliance to keep their cost extremely low but resulting in bitter experience (safety & maintenance) for a significantly high ratio of buyers. Similarly, commercial elevator manufacturers who can provide lifts at say 8 lac in India (bypassing critical standards), can’t provide a home lift in any less than 18–20 lac in say Europe or US, where their manufacturing cost is higher because they have to follow defined standards of safety & quality. This is very similar to any global automobile company operating in India and elsewhere globally. There’s always a difference and you know very well why.
Safety devices to be used for an elevator could be widely subjective to it’s application, overall. Let us put it like this. For example - Consider a home lift which is specially tailor made keeping in mind mobility requirements of family members (say 3–4 people) & a passenger (commercial) elevator meant to elevate a crowd at a time and connect multiple floors of a mid/high rise building. In a private house (where one could have elderly parents & kids with slower reflexes) it is not possible to have a trained lift operator/technician 24 x 7 for any emergency situation; whereas in a commercial building (mall/office etc.) one has to have a lift operator. In a commercial elevator, a sign with do’s & don’ts can be put out as advisory, but in the house one can’t restrain kids especially. This is where safety is crucial and needs to be dealt according to usage pattern & application. There could be so many areas which should be looked upon, while exploring a home elevator. ARD, Safety Curtains, Floor Leveller, Emergency Lever in the shaft, Magnetic driven Controls, Over Speed Governor, Counterweight buffers, Communication device, Trap Door etc. etc., which every elevator should have as standard, but unfortunately in India, we are yet to have any specific set of guidelines or safety standards defined by BIS. This is where even global brands are manipulating consumers by putting critical safety devices as optional to reduce cost and sell their products at subsidized costs. And even if any of these components are applied, they are of substandard quality which often doesn’t function when required. India ranks very high in elevator accidents globally. You can, in fact, type ‘elevator accidents in India’ on Google and you’ll be surprised with what you’ll find. Here’s a link to validate this - Elevator makers lobby for national safety standards amid rising accidents - The Economic Times In similar ways to, how one checks for HALLMARK certification while buying gold, it would be wise to look at elevators which come with 3rd party certification from global agencies; in fact go one step ahead and demand to see the sample certificate for the elevator which you’re exploring. That will be a validation of high degree for a consumer (more so, if the consumer is non-technical). It is very crucial for consumers to be not lethargic and not trust brands without engaging in proper research, before they make a decision to buy any elevator for any application.