Small Home Elevator | Portal Frame, Space-Saving

What a portal frame saves, and what it does not

A portal frame is two vertical posts tied together at the top by a head frame, standing on its own. The guide rails are fixed to the frame, and the machine sits on the head. This page describes the structure the same way: a self-supporting frame that does not depend on load-bearing walls. That single sentence is the reason this machine exists, and it is also the sentence most often misread. What it means is that the lift is not hung off the building. What it does not mean is that the lift stands on nothing.

The saving is real and it sits mostly on the builder's side of the invoice. An enclosed lift needs four walls, a floor opening formed and trimmed, a hoistway finished on the inside, and usually a machine room or a rebated space for one. A framed lift arrives as a structure. The walls around it are a screen, not a load path, so they can be existing brick, a stud partition, a plastered recess or glazing. Nothing has to be squared off to structural tolerance, because the thing that must be square is the frame, and the frame was squared in the factory.

The four things a frame does not remove

Four items stay on the list. There is still a footprint to give up: the frame stands on the floor and needs its own space in the plan, whether that is a corner nobody uses or the dry side of a stairwell. There is still a load path: the frame is fixed at defined points, and those points have to reach something that can take them, which is a question for the approval drawing and the structural check.

There are still door openings at every landing, cut and made good in whatever the wall happens to be. And there is still a supply to bring to the machine position, on its own circuit, with an isolation point somebody can reach afterwards.

Key figures: what is stated here, and what the drawing carries

The table below has two kinds of row and it is worth knowing which is which before you read it. The upper rows are the facts this page's own blocks carry. The last row is the list of figures those blocks do not carry — not because they are secret, but because they do not exist until somebody measures your position. On a lift built to a drawing, a load or a travel height quoted before the survey belongs to a different machine.

Why the empty half of the table is the important half

A supplier who quotes a rated load, a speed and a car size before seeing your plan is either quoting a catalogue machine or guessing. Both are expensive to discover later, because by then the floor opening has been cast and the wall has been chased.

The figures that decide whether a lift suits a house come from a survey: the space in plan, the floor-to-floor distances, what the frame is fixed to, the route the crate takes in, and where the supply reaches.

So the sequence runs the other way round from a shop. You send the readings, our engineers return a drawing that fixes the machine to your numbers, and only then does a firm price exist. Everything in the third row of that table moves together: widen the car and the load rises, raise the travel and the machine changes, deepen the pit and the frame's foundation changes with it.

Retrofitting a house that was never planned around a lift

Most framed lifts go into buildings that already exist. The house has a staircase that works and a corner that does not. Three questions decide the rest, and none of them is about the machine: where the frame stands, what the floor under it can take, and how people reach the door at each landing. Answer those three and the retrofit is ordinary work.

What typically goes wrong, and when it shows up

The failures in retrofit work cluster in the same three places. A frame is ordered against a plan sketched from memory, and the corner turns out to be 80 mm narrower than the sketch. The floor-to-floor distances are taken once at the middle of the stair and assumed to be equal, and the top landing is 40 mm short. The route in is checked through the front door and not along the corridor, and the crate arrives at a doorway it does not pass. Each of those is found on site, in the week the crate is open, which is the most expensive week of the project to find anything.

None of them requires expertise to prevent. They require the readings taken at the position and written down rather than remembered. Take the ten readings on the sheet at the end of this page, add a photograph of each landing, and the drawing that comes back will match the building the first time.

Supply, control and what the electrician has to confirm

The blocks on this page name the drive as electric traction and stop there. They do not state a voltage, a phase count or a frequency, and this page is not going to invent them. What can be said with confidence is that the answer is a machine-level decision rather than a site preference, and that it is fixed at the same time as the machine on the approval drawing.

That makes the electrical work a short list of readings rather than a guessing game. What matters is the supply at the machine position, measured with normal load on elsewhere in the house, which is often lower than the figure at the consumer unit. The lift wants its own circuit from a way that can be isolated and locked, with an isolation point that stays reachable for the life of the building. It should not share with anything that switches on and off in bursts: a lift is a motor, a brake and a control panel on one feed, and a fridge on that circuit is a fault waiting for an afternoon.

What the control side does, in plain terms

A traction machine with an electronic control panel starts the car, holds it level at each landing, and applies a brake when it stops. You will feel that as a lift that moves off without a jolt and settles without a step at the sill. The control panel is also where the safety chain lives: if a landing door is not closed, or the stop circuit is broken, the car does not move. This page lists no individual safety device because the blocks on it do not list one, and copying a device list from another model would be a fiction. The current list for the market you are building in is issued with the tender documents.

Two practical notes for the survey. Photograph the consumer unit at the same time as you photograph each landing; the electrician will ask for it. And if the house has a generator or an inverter, say so on the enquiry, because a lift circuit on a standby supply changes what the panel has to do.

The cabin, the door line, and the one decision that cannot be changed later

Three things about the car are stated on this page: the cabin is stainless steel, the door type is automatic, and the structure that surrounds them is the portal frame. That is the whole of it. There is no finish list, no floor option, no handrail schedule and no lighting specification in these blocks. Rather than fill that gap with the usual gallery of marble and brushed brass, this page sticks to the parts that are named.

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What to ask for that this page cannot show you

Cabin finishes, flooring, handrail, mirror and lighting are all selectable on a machine of this class, and they are decided after the model is fixed and before the crate is packed. Because none of them appears in this page's blocks, the honest way to handle them is to ask: send your plan, get the drawing, then request the finish sheet that goes with the chosen car size. That order works because the finish choices do not change the frame, while the frame decides what will fit around it.

One comparison is worth making while you are at it. If the priority is a cabin that reads as part of the room rather than a box in it, a portal frame makes that easier than an enclosed shaft. The surround can be glazed or left open on the sides that carry nothing, because the frame does the work and the screen beside it is a design decision. The smart home elevator on the same frame takes that further with a touch control panel, and the compact range covers the smaller plans.

Handover: the paperwork to hold, and the checks to watch yourself

This page does not list safety devices, and that is a deliberate choice rather than an oversight. The technical and commercial blocks on it name a drive system, a structure, a door type, a cabin material and two standards. They do not name a device list, a standard for the completed installation, or a test regime for your country. Compliance paperwork assembled after the fact is the classic way a residential project turns expensive. So the useful question is not which devices the machine has, but what you will be holding in writing on the day it is handed over.

Our engineers will send the device list and the installation standard that apply to your market with the tender documents, because those change by country and by building type. The rest of this page is the part you can insist on wherever the building is: the paperwork, and the tests you or your contractor should see performed before the final payment moves.

Three tests worth watching yourself

You do not need to understand the control panel to check whether the job is finished. Stand at each landing and watch three things. The car should arrive level with the sill, with no step that a walking stick would catch. The landing door should not open until the car is there, and should not be pushable while the car is away. The car should refuse to move with a hand held across the door line, and reopen on its own when it does. Each takes under a minute, and each is a defect that gets more expensive to argue about later.

Ask for the test record to be signed on the day the checks are done rather than sent later, and have the installing contractor present. The handover is where the frame, the wiring and the building work stop being three companies' problems and become one machine.

How a framed lift is installed, in six steps

A framed lift has a different sequence from a lift built into a shaft, and the difference is worth understanding before you commit to a date. Site work is front-loaded: the openings, the fixings and the supply are prepared before anything arrives. Once the crate is open, the machine goes together quickly, because the frame was squared and aligned in the factory rather than on your landing.

1. 1. Survey and drawing

   You send the plan readings, the photographs and the supply details. Our engineers return a drawing that fixes the frame position, the fixings, the door face and the machine's own figures. Nothing is ordered until you have checked that drawing against the building.

2. 2. Approval and order

   You confirm the drawing, including the door position on the frame face. Everything after this point is built to it. The order carries the model, the car size, the door arrangement and the finish choices that are settled at this stage.

3. 3. Site preparation

   The openings are cut at each landing and made good, the fixing positions are prepared, the supply is brought to the machine position with an isolation point that stays accessible, and the route in is cleared. This is the stage that needs a builder and an electrician rather than a lift engineer.

4. 4. Delivery and frame assembly

   The crate is unpacked at the position, or as close to it as the route allows. The frame is assembled, levelled and fixed at the points the drawing calls for. Rails and machine go onto the frame, and the frame is checked for plumb before anything else is hung on it.

5. 5. Car, doors and commissioning

   The car and the automatic doors are fitted, the control panel is wired and the lift is run for the first time. Levelling is set at each landing, the door operation is timed, and the stop circuit is tested. This is the step where the machine's own figures from the drawing are confirmed on the finished installation.

6. 6. Handover

   The tests are witnessed, the paperwork listed in the handover checklist is handed over, and the people who will use the lift are shown how it behaves. After that the only routine attention it needs is the maintenance the manual specifies.

Where the time actually goes

Almost all of the elapsed time in a retrofit sits in step three and in the wait for the crate, and almost none of it sits in step four. A common mistake is to book the lift delivery before the openings exist, on the theory that the machine can be installed while the builder catches up. It cannot: the frame has to be fixed to prepared positions, and a frame assembled in a room where the openings are still to be cut will be in the way of the cutting.

The other scheduling decision is who does what. Installations run smoothest when one party owns the site work and the lift company owns the machine, with the drawing as the boundary. Put your builder and your electrician in front of the approved drawing before the order is placed, so the fixings and the cable route are their problem while they are still planning.

Service, spares and the warranty terms to ask for

Here is the awkward part of buying a lift, and it applies to every supplier. A machine that runs a handful of times a day still has moving parts, and the terms covering those parts are decided in the offer rather than on a product page. The blocks on this page state no warranty period and no service interval, so rather than borrow a period from another model, this page sets out what to ask for in writing.

What maintenance on a framed lift actually involves

The frame itself is the least interesting part of the maintenance schedule, which is the point of it: a structure with no moving parts and no finish to redecorate needs looking at rather than working on. Attention goes to the parts that touch the car every trip, the door mechanism above all, because it operates twice per journey and takes the most wear of anything on the machine. Then the drive, where the brake and the suspension are the items a manual puts on a timetable.

Two habits make that cheap. Keep the landing area in front of the door clear, so the door is not closing against something every trip. And keep the space around the machine free of stored items, because a machine that cannot be reached cannot be serviced, and that is where a two-hour visit becomes a two-day one.

Questions this page is usually asked

Short answers, and where the answer is "that depends on your building", the question to ask next instead.

What to send for a quotation you can compare

A quotation for a lift is two quotations in one document: the machine, and the work your building needs around it. Ask for them separately. The machine is the part we control and it is fixed once the drawing is signed. The site work is the part that varies from house to house, and hiding it inside a single delivered price is how two offers for the same lift end up thousands apart with no visible reason.

The commercial terms stated on this page are straightforward. Minimum order is 1 set — a single lift, not a project quantity. Payment is by T/T or L/C. Packing is an export non-fumigation wood box, which is the crate that arrives on site. Supply runs at 20 sets per month and delivery is 40 working days, so the early part of that clock is the drawing approval rather than the factory. Origin is China, and the model on the parameter table is YST-19.

What comes back, and in what order

Send the list and the reply is a drawing before it is a price: frame position, fixings, door face, and the machine's own figures for your building. You check the drawing against the room, tell us what to change, and the quotation follows with the machine and the site work shown on separate lines. If the readings are incomplete, the reply is the specific question rather than an assumed number, which is faster for both sides than a quotation that has to be revised twice.