Are you UNDER_Elevated?  Part 2

How many times have you heard your building occupants complaining about slow elevators in your building?  I think elevator companies should devise some method of determining how many times the passenger hits the hall call button before the elevator finally arrives. Slow elevators incur a myriad of costs.  Hall buttons need more frequent replacement, productive work time is lost, and reputations suffer causing reductions in rent for landlords. It’s difficult to come up with an exact method of quantifying these costs but I think you understand what I’m talking about.  I’m sure also that the readers can come up with several other problems.

In the last writing I discussed door operation.  Opening doors faster can make a significant difference, especially in buildings with many floors.

Next we can talk about what is called the “profile” of an elevator. In this context profile refers to the way the elevator goes through the process of starting out speeding up approaching the desired floor, slowing down, and then stopping at the floor, otherwise known in the industry as “flight time”. The differentiation between the three stages is called “transitioning”.

These three stages can be configured in many different ways to achieve many different purposes.  All  of this folds into a category called ride quality.  At the very beginning elevators start slowly to try and avoid a jerk. Many  traction elevators operate at a top speed of 350 to 500 feet per minute.  350 feet per minute translates into 3.98 miles per hour. Now if 4 miles per hour doesn’t seem like a real fast start imagine a car with a chair attached to the front of it coming at you at 4 miles per hour and “catching you” while in a sitting position. I’ll bet that would jar your body pretty good and if you missed ….ouch!  So the elevator has to start and ramp from 0 to 4mph without jerking your pants down or causing some other such wardrobe failure.  By the same token it should not come to an abrupt stop.  Another experiment would be to place an uncovered cup of coffee in your car, let it roll up to 4 mph and then slam on the brake. See what happens?  When we get on elevators we aren’t prepared for sudden stops and starts.

What CAN be done though is to measure those transition zones and shorten them. This is a tradeoff between comfort and convenience that, if done properly, most passengers should not mind.  If adjusted properly it will hardly be noticeable.  You still must maintain the smoothness of the ride.  These adjustments are limited by the particular ability of your equipment to respond to it’s signaling devices. By that I mean if your elevator id moving too fast when it gets to the device that signals it to stop it will overshoot the floor. Now you have a tripping hazard.  In most cases zones have room to be minimized thus speeding up the floor to floor trip.  This takes a great degree of skill on the part of your elevator mechanic so when he or she performs this task for you make sure to monitor the leveling quality for a few days to assure precision landings.

Some hydraulic elevators are set to creep in VERY slowly to the floor. This costs a significant amount of energy because the motor runs a lot longer and contributes to heating of the oil in a busy elevator. Hydros are more tricky to adjust but a talented mechanic should be able to do the job for you. You may end up purchasing a system to maintain the temperature of the oil within a certain range because cold and hot oil have different viscosities and that can cause irregularities in performance.

These options should be discussed with your elevator contractor and if they can be implemented it should not cost an arm and a leg. Just make sure you monitor the results to keep the ride satisfactory for your building occupants.

That’s all for now! If any of you have other suggestions please let me know.

Until next time, as always, any ideas, input or comments are appreciated. Especially want to thank my regular readers fro your emails and compliments. Don’t be afraid to ask.

For now I’ll leave you with the following quotes:..

Don't worry about the world coming to an end today. It's already tomorrow in Australia.
Peanuts

Or…

Hell is a place where the motorists are French, the policemen are German, and the cooks are English.
Author Unknown

Don’t forget to email me (elevatorernie@hotmail.com). Your suggestions, comments, and questions are always welcome.

Thank you,

Ernie