Whether you need a lifting solution for a workplace or residential building, you could have seen terms like ‘lift services’, ‘lift installation’ and ‘lift repairs’ and understandably been left confused. What do they all mean? Are any lift companies you approach going to pummel you with jargon?
We are eager to put you at ease on both points. We are Sheridan Lifts, the UK’s largest independent lift company, and offer a vast range of lift services. However, we are dedicated to communicating with our customers in a manner that will not leave them confused.
For this reason, we have decided to prepare a detailed article tackling three distinct terms — ‘lift services’, ‘lift installation’ and ‘lift repairs’ — used particularly often in the lift industry. Once you know these phrases inside out, you will be able to contact us with even greater confidence.
The Importance of Taking Care of Your Lifts
It is essential that any lift at your workplace is subject to regular maintenance. Otherwise, your company would be risking too often losing precious time and money to sorting out lift breakdowns that could have been prevented with more care and attention.
A lift that incurs increasing wear and tear can put its users — like employees, customers or clients — in danger. For example, faulty components can jam the lift. If this happens, any entrapped passengers in the lift could accidentally damage it in an attempt to rectify things.
However, preventative lift maintenance can pick up on small issues, allowing them to be resolved before they risk mushrooming into much bigger problems that would require emergency lift repair work to be carried out.
In essence, regular lift maintenance can help to ensure that any downtime the lift faces is more of a blip than a long-running outage that forces you to cordon off that lift for days on end.
This point can bear particular emphasis if you are in the private sector — as the longer this lift is out of action, the more that customer or client satisfaction and your company’s reputation could suffer. As a result, you could potentially miss out on valuable business opportunities.
Meanwhile, if you run a local council or authority, it would naturally be in the interest of both yourself and taxpayers to ensure that the lift is looked after as cost-effectively as possible.
Lift Services & Maintenance
We offer a range of lift services for helping our clients not only to protect the safety and reliability of their lifts but also to prolong the life of these lifts. During a service visit to your premises, an engineer from Sheridan Lifts can undertake lift services including:
- Checking many items within the lift’s shaft, structure or motor room
- Assessing the lift’s safety features
- Cleaning, lubricating and adjusting all of the lift’s components
Here at Sheridan Lifts, we offer numerous maintenance packages that subtly differ in terms of what lift services they provide. With our Sheridan Standard package, you will get:
- 4, 6 or 12 service visits per annum
- Access to a 24-hour helpline
Meanwhile, our all-inclusive Sheridan Comprehensive package accounts for all of the following:
- Guaranteed callout services
- Engineers’ method statements
- Onsite service reports
- Risk assessments completed in full
The engineer will let you know what work they have carried out as part of their service visit, and suggest potential repairs or improvements not covered by a lift maintenance contract you already have in place.
However, preventative lift maintenance isn’t just ‘good practice’; it is also crucial for legal reasons. The Lifting Operations and Lifting Equipment Regulations 1998 (LOLER) place particular maintenance duties on businesses that own, operate or have control over lifting equipment.
We have previously specified in the Lift Safety Guide on the Sheridan Lifts website: “Legally, any lift that carries people must be inspected at least every six months and any lift that carries goods must be inspected annually.”
Lift Installation
Sometimes, you might actually need a lift to be provided entirely afresh. This could be because you are in the process of assembling a whole new building, or you have an existing building where a lift needs to be replaced in order for you to meet accessibility requirements.
However, the preparatory work for a lift installation project always entails more than just deciding on the new lift’s location and size. Fortunately, we can design a bespoke lift that will fit in seamlessly with the wider building, leaving the two feel as though they were originally built as part of the same project.
If you are indeed intent on arranging a lift installation, we urge you to consult the Sheridan Lifts team on which of our various lifting solutions you should choose. The many different types of lifts we are capable of installing include:
Passenger lifts — These are largely self-explanatory, as they transfer passengers between floors. The many different buildings suitable for passenger lifts include apartment blocks, office complexes, museums, shopping centres, hospitals and industrial premises.
Platform lifts — These tend to be installed for accessibility reasons, such as to serve as mobility lifting equipment. You could therefore opt for platform lifts in order to let people with impaired mobility move between floors of a multi-storey building more easily.
Service lifts — In such buildings as care homes, hospitals, hotels and warehouses, service lifts can significantly ease the transportation of bulky and heavy goods like trolleys and pallets. Hence, serviced lifts can often be easier to find in commercial or industrial sites than residential ones.
Dumbwaiter lifts — Otherwise known as automatic service lifts, dumbwaiters can often work well in the same kinds of buildings as ‘standard’ service lifts. Nonetheless, the former are smaller — and should only be used for transporting lightweight to mid-weight goods.
Glass lifts — Adding these to shopping centres, office blocks and hotels can work especially well for lift modernisation purposes, as glass lifts are visually impressive and can afford users a spectacular view. This particular lifting solution can thus assist in impressing customers.
Car lifts — If you are responsible for a multi-storey car park, you could consider installing a car lift to reduce the necessity of spacious ramps. In a residential setting, a car lift can even be used for shifting multiple cars underground and consequently freeing up driveway space.
Energy-saving lifts — Awareness of climate change has led organisations to increasingly focus on setting environmental targets. We are able to install energy-saving lifts that satisfy BREEAM (Building Research Establishment’s Environmental Assessment Method) requirements.
Bespoke lifts — For bespoke projects, such as the development of new buildings aimed at meeting exact requirements, members of the Sheridan Lifts team can install bespoke lifts to suit. A bespoke lift can also be the perfect solution for a site where major planning restrictions apply.
Scenic lifts — As the term suggests, scenic lifts are designed to look especially good! The types of scenic lifts we offer include curved glass lifts, glass-bottom lifts, two- or three-sided glass lifts and panoramic lifts, while we can also provide scenic lifts in bespoke form.
If you reckon you would struggle to stomach the cost of a traditional lift installation upfront, you could opt for the alternative of lift leasing. This would give you the same quality products and services but enable you to spread the cost over a longer period of time.
Lift Repairs and When You Need Them
Until a lift stops working, you might not realise just how important it has been to your operations. Imagine, for example, a lift breaking down when clients of yours are still in it. In this scenario, it would be imperative that you know how to restore the lift’s functionality as soon as possible.
We can undertake emergency repairs to lifts in the following geographic areas:
- The North West England region, including Manchester and Liverpool.
- The Midlands cities of Birmingham, Nottingham, Leicester and Derby.
- London and the home counties of Hertfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Essex and Kent.
On request, we can send experienced lift engineers to these areas to help customers’ onsite teams with both identifying and overcoming lift problems.
Often, when a lift does break down, it can be due to one or more of the following:
- A lack of regular lift maintenance.
- Not using the lift’s doors properly.
- Failing to strictly follow the lift’s weight limits.
- Overusing the lift.
- Improper lift installation.
Even when a malfunctioning lift is empty, the resulting outage can have adverse implications for customer satisfaction — underlining the importance of time-effective lift repair.
How Sheridan Lifts Can Help You With Your New Lifts
The family-run company of Sheridan Lifts can install lifts anywhere in the UK, while we offer long-term maintenance and repair contracts in the North West England and South East England regions as well as around Birmingham and the Midlands.
With all of our lift services, we adhere to high standards and keep our customers informed about ongoing projects. For further details about our expertise in lift installation, maintenance and repair, please call our Northern office on 0330 175 8741, our Southern office at 01923 609 617 or our Midlands office at 0192 266 1069.