Single-Phase Hydraulic Elevator | Deck Floor, 14.5 m

What a deck floor changes about a hydraulic home lift

The floor type on the specification block is deck floor and the pit depth is 0 m. Read together, the meaning is plain: this lift stands on a floor that is built up rather than poured, and needs no hole cut beneath it. Buyers looking for a deck floor home elevator usually ask one thing — can a full lift stand on a floor that was never dug for one — and the answer is yes, once the load path is checked.

A conventional hydraulic installation starts with excavation: a pit cut into the ground floor, lined, drained and made watertight, with the cylinder and the car's stopping position living at least partly inside it. On the deck-floor arrangement there is no excavation at all. The lowest landing is the deck itself, the cylinder works above the deck structure rather than in the ground, and the first stop is the deck level.

Load path: where the weight actually goes

On a deck the lift cannot simply be bolted to the boards. Boards carry people and furniture by spreading load across many joists; a lift concentrates a much heavier, much more repetitive load into a small area. The useful question is therefore not "is the deck strong?" but "what is directly under the lift, and where does that member end?"

Two arrangements are common and both are workable. The first is a deck whose joists already sit over a bearer or a wall line at the lift position, so the load goes straight down into structure that was designed to take it. The second is a lift on its own frame, spreading the load across several joists and positioned to straddle a bearer rather than sit between two. What decides between them is what is under the floor, which is why a photograph from below beats a description from above.

Levelling and drainage: what replaces the pit

A hydraulic lift travels on guide rails, and rails are only as straight as what they stand on. A deck with a fall built into it for drainage, or one that has settled unevenly, tilts the rail line. The car then runs against the guides instead of between them, which shows up first as noise at one landing and later as wear on the guide shoes. Levelling is done at one level only — the lowest, where the lift stands — because everything above is carried by the lift's own structure.

A conventional pit has to be sealed and drained, because it is a hole in the ground beside a building. A 0 m pit removes the hole, and with it the sump and the standing water pits are famous for. What remains is the ordinary water management of the room — not nothing, because decks sit at the edge of buildings and above voids. Check what you would check for any floor-standing plant: that the surface under the lift sheds rather than ponds, and that the room drains away from the position.

None of the three is a commitment. They are what lets the factory answer the only structural question here — whether this deck carries this lift — without a site visit.

The figures in one table, and the ones that wait for your drawing

Seventeen lines carry every number this page publishes. They fall into two groups: properties of the machine, and limits you measure the house against. The first group is settled; the second becomes a design the moment your dimensions arrive.

Two of these lines do the heavy lifting. 220 V, 50 Hz, single phase with a 2.2 kW motor says what the electrician has to provide, and separates this lift from the three-phase machines that dominate the category. 0 m pit on a deck floor says what the builder does not have to do.

The travel line is the one to read carefully. 14.5 m over five stops is the maximum this machine is offered to, not a target. Five stops at 14.5 m is an average floor-to-floor of roughly three metres — ordinary domestic height. Taller floors reach 14.5 m sooner; lower floors fit more stops in. What is fixed is the travel, and the stop count follows from your floor-to-floor heights.

What is fixed before you measure, and what your drawing fixes

The distinction matters when comparing quotations, because two sellers can quote the same machine and mean different things by the same number. The table below separates the figures you can rely on today from those that cannot honestly be given until the position is measured.

Where a line reads "not stated on this page", that is not a value looking for a guess — it would be meaningless before the position is known. Two houses can take the same machine and arrive at different loads, speeds and car plans, and the approval drawing is where those numbers are set.

What a single-phase 220 V supply actually means on site

The supply on the block is 220 V, 50 Hz, single phase and the motor is 2.2 kW. In a house those two lines mean something practical: the lift runs off a supply the building already has, without a three-phase connection being brought in or a new distribution board being built.

That is the whole appeal. Most hydraulic machines in this category, and almost every traction machine, are built around a three-phase motor, because three phases give a smoother torque curve and lower current for the same power. Waiting for a three-phase connection is one of the most common reasons a domestic lift project stalls, and on a finished house it can be a larger piece of work than the lift itself. A single-phase machine removes that critical path — though not the arithmetic: at 220 V the current for a given power is higher than at 380 V across three phases.

Why the pump set is the part that decides the ride

A hydraulic lift does not pull a car up on a rope. It pushes it up on oil, and the quality of that push is set at the power unit: the pump, the valve block and the way the machine ramps pressure up and releases it. Two machines can share a motor size and behave differently, because one lets the oil through in a smooth ramp and the other opens a valve and lets the car find its own level.

The 2.9 m cylinders here are the large-bore type, and the bore is what carries the load at a comfortable pressure. Large bore also means more oil moves for the same travel, which is why ram speed and pump displacement are matched in the design against your load and travel.

What the supply does not change

A single-phase supply does not make the lift a domestic appliance in the electrical sense. It still needs a dedicated circuit, its own protective device, an earth and an isolator, and it still lists an emergency stop among its safety features. What changes is the form of the supply, and with it the size of the electrical project.

The control side is unchanged. The controller is microprocessor based, which is what handles the landing calls, the levelling at each stop and the sequencing that keeps door and travel apart. It is also the part that carries the settings a service engineer adjusts years later.

Civil work on a 0 m pit installation, in the order it happens

A pit-free hydraulic lift moves work out of the ground and into the floors above it. There is no excavation, no pit lining, no sump and no drainage below the lowest landing. What is left: an opening at each level, a sound load path under the lowest landing, a clear 3 m above the top landing, and the finishes around each door.

Where a machine of this kind is described as a single floor hydraulic lift, what is usually meant is a lift whose lowest landing is a floor rather than a pit — the arrangement this page covers. The order below wastes least time, because every later step is sized from the readings taken at the first one.

1. Survey the position and the supply

   Ten readings, taken at the position. The lift footprint at the lowest landing and every floor above, the floor-to-floor height at each level, the clear height above the top landing and the clear opening at each landing. Then what is under the deck, and the supply measured with the household load on.

2. Approve the drawing, then hold the production window

   The approval drawing fixes the car plan, the shaft plan, the landing positions, the door side and the supply point. Production runs in a 45-day window from approval, so civil work and production should be arranged as a pair rather than in sequence.

3. Prepare the load path at the lowest landing

   On a deck, this is the step that carries the whole installation. The load has to reach a joist, a bearer or a wall line without crushing the boards underneath, and the deck has to be level across the footprint in both directions. Correct it here; correcting it afterwards means moving the machine.

4. Form the floor openings and clear the top landing

   Each opening follows the shaft plan, and the trim or kerb around it is what the landing finishes close against. Above the highest landing, 3 m of clear height has to be free of beams, roof structure and services — the one step where a late discovery is genuinely expensive.

5. Deliver through the tightest doorway on the route

   The parts travel in an export non-fumigation wood box and arrive as components rather than a finished lift, so what constrains delivery is the tightest doorway, stair or gate on the way in — not the size of the lift.

6. Assemble, commission and hand over

   Assembly goes bottom-up: the lowest landing, then the rails and the car, then the landing doors and the finishes. Commissioning sets the levelling at each stop, the door timing and the emergency stop; handover is when the 1-year warranty starts. What the drawing fixed is checked against the drawing, and the maintenance instructions go into the building's file.

The two steps that go wrong most often

The first is levelling. A deck that looks flat to the eye can carry a fall of a few millimetres per metre, and over the length of a lift footprint that tilts the rail line. It is invisible during the survey and obvious during commissioning, which is why the spirit-level reading belongs in the survey. The second is headroom: a stair landing, a ridge beam or a run of services inside the 3 m above the top landing is the constraint that most often pushes a design change, and the one nobody photographs unless asked. Both become expensive in the week the lift arrives, and neither is expensive to solve early.

The cabin, the door, and the parts people actually touch

Everything a passenger notices comes from three parts: what the car is lined with, how the door opens, and how the two behave together at a landing. The block names the cabin as 304 stainless steel or aluminium alloy and the door as automatic. Those choices are made once, at order.

Click to enlarge

How the automatic door behaves at a landing

An automatic door changes the landing more than it changes the car. The leaves need somewhere to be when they are open, and the sill has to be a continuous surface the car crosses as it arrives. That is why the door face is worth thinking about early, and why the drawing places it rather than the catalogue.

Choosing between the two cabins

If the lift lands anywhere that gets used hard, stainless steel ages least. If the car has to be carried up by hand or assembled into a finished interior, aluminium alloy is the practical one. Neither changes the drive, the travel, the door or the load path — the cabin is decided last and noticed most.

What the block does not give is a car plan, a panel layout, a floor finish or a clear opening width, and those are drawn against your measurements. Contact the engineers with the opening at each landing and a cabin material becomes a cabin drawing.

Safety, and how to check it on the day of handover

The safety feature this page names is the emergency stop button. That is the whole of what the block states, and it is worth saying plainly rather than filling the gap with a list borrowed from another machine. The protection in any particular lift is fixed by the approved design for that position, by the components it calls for, and by the rules where it is installed.

What can be listed is what is worth checking. A hydraulic lift with an automatic door makes a handful of things visible and testable at handover, and they are the same things a surveyor or building control officer will look for. The list is written as checks rather than promises: each line is something you can watch being demonstrated, with a yes or no answer on the day.

Why the list is written this way

Most product pages answer the safety question with a device list: overspeed governors, buffers, interlocks, slack-rope detectors, alarms and the rest. That list is accurate for the machines it was copied from, and useless as a promise for a machine not yet designed, because the devices a lift legally needs differ from market to market.

So the honest answer to "what protection does it have?" is a drawing plus a handover record, both of which exist only after the position is measured. The checks above work under any regime, because each tests a function rather than a label.

The certification line, read exactly as printed

The commercial block carries one certification entry: ISO 9001. It describes the quality management system the factory is certified to, and it is the only certificate this page claims. No product standard, code of practice or third-party listing is asserted anywhere here, and none should be read into any sentence above.

If your project needs a specific standard named, or a declaration of conformity, that belongs in the enquiry rather than the assumption. Say which regime you are building under and the answer comes back against your document list.

Installation: the four things that decide how quickly it goes in

Installation of a pit-free hydraulic lift is a short job on a site that is ready and a long one on a site that is not, and the difference is almost never the lift itself.

Sequence the delivery against those four rather than the production window alone. Production runs in 45 days from approval — short enough for site work and manufacturing to overlap, but only if preparation is part of the same plan rather than something that starts when the crate arrives.

What handover looks like

Handover is short and should not be skipped: the levelling checked against the drawing, the door cycle run at every landing, the emergency stop operated, and the maintenance instructions and warranty start date handed over in writing. The ten checks in the previous section are the whole of it, and take under an hour on a completed job.

Service, and what the 1-year warranty actually covers

The block on this page states a warranty of 1 year — one year from handover, against the defects the drawing and the components define. What the same block does not state is a service interval, and this page will not invent one. An interval depends on how hard the lift is used and on local rules, and it belongs in the maintenance instructions handed over at the end of the job.

What can be said is what a hydraulic lift rewards attention for. Almost all of it is cheap, and almost all of it is visible from outside the machine.

Three things that shorten a hydraulic lift's life

The first is standing water. A 0 m pit removes the pit sump, but the room still has to shed water, and on a deck it arrives from above as often as from below. The second is an overloaded car — on a domestic lift, usually the once-a-year move; the rated load is a figure on the approval drawing, not a target. The third is deferred small faults: a door that needs a nudge, a stop a few millimetres low, a machine that sounds different. Each is trivial until it becomes a refusal to run.

Questions buyers ask about this machine

Ten questions, answered against what this page publishes and what the approval drawing settles. Where an answer depends on your position, it says so rather than quoting an average.

What to send for a quotation that means something

A quotation for a lift is a drawing with a price attached. Until the factory has the position, all it can return is a range, and a range tells you nothing about whether the lift fits, what it will carry, or how long the site work takes. The list below is the whole of what is needed, and it takes one visit with a tape measure.

What comes back should be a drawing rather than a promise: the car and shaft plans for your position, the stops and the travel, and the rated load and speed for that design. It should also give the clear opening, the supply the machine needs and a written production window. If a reply contains a price but no position, it is an estimate and should be labelled as one.

What the commercial block already settles

Three things do not need negotiating. A single lift is the stated minimum order, so one house is an ordinary order; the block gives a supply ability of 10 sets. Payment is by T/T or L/C at sight, the route most importers already use. Production is scheduled in a 45-day window from approval — worth putting in the calendar next to the civil work, because the two are arranged around each other rather than in sequence.

Two things to take to the site

The last two blocks are the ones that get used. The converter turns the figures on this page into the units your tape measure and drawings are in, and the survey sheet is the list the factory reads. Print it, fill it in, and photograph the harder readings rather than describing them.