Hydraulic Residential Elevator | 5 Stops for Homes & Villas

1. Who this layout suits, and who it does not

A hydraulic residential elevator lifts the car with oil pressure from a power unit rather than with ropes and a counterweight. That single mechanical choice shapes everything else on this page. The car sits on a ram, the machine room is not a room above the shaft, and the load path goes into the floor of the lowest level instead of into a head beam. Five stops and 14.5 m of travel are the published ceiling for this model, and the pitless version removes the excavation that normally makes a retrofit expensive.

Residential buyers rarely arrive with a drive preference. They arrive with a building: a five-storey town house, an apartment block with a stairwell, a villa with a service void. The fit judgement below is aimed at that situation, because a drive that suits one shell will fight another.

The three cards are not a ranking. They describe which of the three conversations you are actually having: an engineering retrofit, a construction project, or a specification that should be checked against a different machine. Two of the three end with a lift; one ends with advice to look at a different drive.

If those four points are already answerable from your drawings, the rest of this page is about confirming numbers rather than changing the design. Section 3 lists every published figure in one table and marks where each one comes from; section 9 compares the hydraulic layout with traction and screw drives so the choice is made on the building, not on habit.

Everything quoted on this page comes from the specification table published alongside this model: rated capacity, number of stops, travel, speed, pit depth, power supply, motor rating, cabin material, safety devices and warranty. Where a figure is not published, this page says so instead of borrowing a number from another model.

2. Five stops, 14.5 m and 0.6 m/s: what the numbers mean in a house

Three published figures decide how a residential hydraulic elevator feels in daily use: the number of stops, the travel it covers, and the rated speed. The sheet gives five stops, up to 14.5 m and 0.6 m/s. Read together, they describe a low-rise building with generous floor heights rather than a slow lift struggling through a tower.

Five stops means four intervals between the lowest and the highest landing. Split the published 14.5 m across those four intervals and the average distance between stops works out at roughly 3.6 m. That is a comfortable residential floor-to-floor height, which is why the layout is usually quoted for four- and five-storey houses, town houses and small apartment buildings rather than for anything taller.

What 0.6 m/s actually feels like

Speed is easier to judge as time than as a number. A car that covers a full 14.5 m at 0.6 m/s spends about 24 seconds moving. A single storey of 3.6 m takes about 6 seconds of drive time. Most residents judge the lift on those short hops, because that is how the lift is normally used: one or two floors, a few times a day.

An honest reading of those bars matters more than the bars themselves. The published sheet gives a rated speed and a travel; it does not publish door open and close times, acceleration ramps or levelling time. Anyone who tells you that a five-stop lift takes exactly X seconds door to door is quoting a figure that this specification does not contain. The reliable way to judge is to measure a running installation, or to add the delivered door cycle to the numbers above during commissioning.

Work out your own trip time

Use the calculator below with your own floor heights. It applies the published 0.6 m/s to the travel you enter, and it deliberately ignores door dwell, so treat the result as the drive's share of the journey rather than the total wait.

Three phrases that describe the same layout

Buyers reach this layout through three different phrases. Some search for a pitless residential elevator because the excavation is the problem they are trying to solve. Others look for a 5 stop residential lift because their building has five levels and they want to know whether one machine can serve all of them. A third group arrives looking for a residential lift single phase supply, because the building has a domestic supply and no realistic route to three-phase power. All three describe the same published configuration on this page, and all three are answered by the same three numbers.

That overlap is worth stating plainly, because it explains why this model is quoted so often for town houses and small apartment buildings. A five-stop layout with no pit and a domestic supply is the combination that existing buildings can usually accept without structural work.

3. Specification overview for this five-stop model

The table below is the working sheet for a project meeting. It carries every figure this model publishes, keeps metric and imperial on the same line so a mixed team can read it, and adds a source column so nobody has to guess where a number came from. Switch units with the control above the table; the sticky header keeps the column meaning visible while you scroll a long row list on a phone or a laptop.

How to read the source column

Two of the rows come from the parameter table beside the product photograph, because that is where the commercial and supply information sits. The rest come from the model's own specification list. Keeping the two apart matters when a drawing is checked: a supply voltage and a brand name are quoted from the parameter table, while capacity, travel and speed are engineering figures from the specification list.

Read the two "does not contain" lines as a warning rather than a gap. A shaft size copied from another project is the most common reason a residential lift has to be re-designed after the order, and the table above is deliberately built so you can see which figures are yours to confirm.

4. Apartment retrofit and villa new build: two different jobs

The same five-stop machine arrives at two very different sites. One is an existing apartment building where the shaft, the floor levels and the electrical supply are already fixed by somebody else's design. The other is a villa or a house where the shaft can still be shaped around the lift. Treating them as one project type is the fastest way to lose a week on site.

None of these failures are drive-related. Each of them is decided in the first two weeks of a project and each of them is cheap to fix at that point. The next section deals with the supply question, because that is where residential projects most often discover a problem late.

5. The 220 V single-phase supply, and how to check it

Power is the quiet advantage of this model. The published configuration is 220 V, 50 Hz, single phase with a 4.7 kW motor, so the lift does not need a three-phase supply brought into a house that never had one. On a retrofit, that single line often decides whether the project is affordable: running three-phase power to an existing building can cost more than the lift itself.

It also changes who can help. Any competent electrical contractor can work on a single-phase circuit, so the supply is not a specialist conversation. What still has to be done properly is the circuit design around the machine.

The reason the nameplate matters is that a motor's supply current is not simply its power rating divided by its voltage. Power factor and efficiency both sit in that calculation, and the delivered motor may differ slightly from the rating on the sheet. Sizing a circuit from a number invented on a web page is how a lift ends up tripping a breaker on the busiest day of the year.

Handled early, the supply is a half-day of coordination. Handled late, it becomes the reason a finished lift cannot be handed over, so it belongs on the same checklist as the shaft drawing rather than in the week of commissioning.

Specifying a residential lift single phase supply also removes a coordination problem that catches larger projects. There is no phase rotation to check, no three-phase panel to fit into a domestic board, and no argument about which phase the lift should sit on. On a retrofit, that simplicity is often worth more than the theoretical efficiency a three-phase machine would offer.

Where the building has three-phase power already, the published single-phase configuration can still be used, provided the circuit is designed for it. What matters is that the decision is made from the supply actually available at the power unit position rather than from an assumption made in an office.

6. Cabin, doors and the finishes people actually touch

Residents never see the power unit. They see the car interior, the door, and the threshold at each floor, so those three items carry most of the perceived quality of a residential lift. The published sheet fixes two of them: the cabin is built in 304 stainless steel or aluminium alloy, and the doors are automatic sliding doors.

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Door and threshold decisions that outlive the installation

A sliding door leaves no swing space in the landing, which is what makes the layout viable in a narrow stairwell. The trade is that the finished opening has to be built accurately. Frame tolerance, floor level and the final floor finish all meet at the sill. A sill set before the screed is poured is the thing residents will notice for the next twenty years.

• Set the finished floor level at every landing before the sill is fixed, not after the tiles are laid.
• Agree the car interior before the shaft is clad, so the cabin panels and the landing reveals can share the same datum.
• Keep the door pocket clear of pipework and conduit runs that were never drawn.
• Decide the lighting position inside the car early, because the cable route passes through the same wall.

Cabin choice is also the point where two similar projects stop looking alike. Where stainless steel is the direction, read the published stainless-cabin model alongside this page: 304 stainless steel cabin hydraulic home elevator. It shows the same pitless five-stop layout with the cabin finish as the headline difference.

Replacement panels, sills and door parts should be ordered from the manufacturer's parts list. A locally fabricated panel will fit the opening and will not match the original car, and matching a brushed finish later is harder than ordering it once.

7. Safety devices and the hand-over checks

The published safety list for this model is short and specific: an emergency stop, overload protection and a brake. Short lists are easy to verify, which is the point. On hand-over day each one can be demonstrated, written down and kept with the project file instead of being taken on trust.

A hand-over is not a demonstration of the drive. It is a list of tests with someone's name against each line, and it is the only moment when every device is guaranteed to be observable at once.

Two of those lines are usually argued about. The isolation point is a building issue that the lift depends on, and the power unit position is the one that gets quietly blocked six months later by a store of garden furniture. Both are cheap to settle on the day and awkward to settle afterwards.

If a device needs adjusting after hand-over, it is worth recording who adjusted it and why. Overload settings and door behaviour get changed by well-meaning maintenance visits, and a written trail is what stops the same adjustment being made twice in opposite directions.

8. Living with a pitless layout: what maintenance involves

A pitless hydraulic lift is maintained from the lowest level rather than from a pit below it. That changes the routine in a useful way: most of the checks are carried out standing on a normal floor, and there is no pit to drain, ventilate or clean.

What the published sheet does not give is a service interval. That is not an oversight to work around with a guess; it is a number to agree with the service partner at hand-over, written into the maintenance record, and then kept.

Owners sometimes ask whether a pitless layout is harder to maintain than a conventional one. In practice the opposite is often true, because the parts that need attention are standing in daylight at floor level instead of sitting in a pit that has to be pumped out before anyone can work in it.

9. Hydraulic, traction or screw: choosing the drive

Most residential projects end up choosing between three drives, and the choice is usually made by the building rather than by preference. The table below sets out what this page publishes for the hydraulic option, and states plainly what has to be confirmed on the other two rather than borrowing numbers from this model.

The honest summary is that hydraulic wins on the building, not on the ride. Where a shell cannot be excavated, cannot take a machine space and only has a single-phase supply, the hydraulic layout is the option that fits without rebuilding the house around it.

One more test is worth applying before the drive is fixed. Ask what the building would have to give up for each option: a deeper base, a machine space above the car, a three-phase supply, or a taller top landing. The option that asks the existing shell to change least is usually the one that reaches installation without a redesign, even when its rated speed is the lowest of the three.

10. Questions buyers ask before ordering this layout

11. What to send for a quote on a five-stop layout

A quotation for a residential lift is only as good as the inputs behind it. Six of the ten items below take ten minutes to collect, and they remove most of the assumptions a supplier would otherwise have to make about your building.

Send those ten items and the quotation is prepared from the configuration that will actually be delivered, rather than from a standard sheet that quietly assumes a different building. Where one item is still unknown, say so and it can be marked as pending instead of guessed.

Two published figures are worth repeating at this point because they decide so much of the answer: the layout covers up to 14.5 m across five stops, and the pitless version needs no excavated pit at the lowest level. If your building fits inside those two statements, the rest of the specification follows from your own measurements.