OT- Home elevator overshooting second floor a bit...how to adjust ?

Milacron · Aug 27, 2018

The house I bought back in Jan. is tall and narrow, thus came with a home elevator. Lately it overshoots the second floor by a few inches when going down from the third floor...fine when going up from first floor, so going down is the only problem. Curiously it does not overshoot the first floor when going down....I was assuming maybe the cable has stretched over time but seems like it would overshoot the first floor as well if that was the case.

Thoughts ? (besides the Captain Obvious of "calling a home elevator company")

gustafson · Aug 27, 2018

Interesting

I wonder if there are limit switches on the thing that are different going up and going down

My old garage door opener has switches on a little lead screw that are surprisingly accurate

I guess that is what you need to figure out, where are the limit switches

thermite · Aug 27, 2018

Milacron said:
The house I bought back in Jan. is tall and narrow, thus came with a home elevator. Lately it overshoots the second floor by a few inches when going down from the third floor...fine when going up from first floor, so going down is the only problem. Curiously it does not overshoot the first floor when going down....I was assuming maybe the cable has stretched over time but seems like it would overshoot the first floor as well if that was the case.

Thoughts ? (besides the Captain Obvious of "calling a home elevator company")

The "captain obvious" depends on LAW, your rig, your jurisdiction, lifts being classed as potentially LETHAL, some few "residential" granted exception, most multi-floor not-even.

Otherwise, what the proper lift mechanic does is adjust the limit switches, of wotever type they be. Those are generally placed AT each opening, cable or chain or hydraulics independent. Up travel and down travel may be independently adjustable to cover stretch/bounce, but should then "seek" a zero, as cab loaded mass also enters the equation.

Hardly ANY lift ever installed in the world gets the blessing of perfectly-spaced floors. Even new carpet, tile, or laminate on a given floor out of several requires a trim adjustment to prevent trip-hazard, so they all have those to sync them to each opening on the route. Even if just two. And I did mention variable cab loading? Can't do this easily or well from up on the lifting gear alone, nor down in a pit.

Mind.. with your luck and the mucking about with things electro-mechanical?.. you may have an exception.., a repurposed die-handling cart or loading-dock scissor lift, CNC adopted off a late-model Deckel, is it?

Basically, if it has a "certificate", on display in the cab or down in the superintendent's office, one MUST call the current approved service firm.

Regulatory folk get serious shirty anyone else messes with a lift, ("lyfta" in Icelandic, but I digress..) and both other tenants and the service folk WILL rat you out to cover their own arses.

adama · Aug 27, 2018

Most elevator controls are pretty crude, would have 2 limit switches, a high speed cut - to low speed change over and a low speed - break engager one on the floor level. Guessing you have issues with one of thoes or its trigger flag. If it was all floors it would point to brake issues. As its only one floor could well be just the one switch.

Some lifts have switches on the car - in the shaft, others have a simple windy drum of cable like a dog lead attached to the car and then that has a switch drum that achives the same. Theres some pretty neat ways the lift manufactures use to do this stuff, kinda some of the best electro mechanical porn out there.

Googling your lift OEM should reveal some clues, but would kinda assume you have manuals for it?

thermite · Aug 27, 2018

adama said:
kinda some of the best electro mechanical porn out there.

Too right!

The early metallic-state "music box" call-request / call-satisfied recorder/dispatcher and the electro-mechanical route optimization (bypass sometimes, otherwise not) logic was impressive enough to have survived as a term in hard-disk-drive head R/W seek optimization algorithms. The term "elevator seeking" used even once migrated into firmware running on dirty-beach-sand.

Similar logic had been applied to call setup/cleardown for the largest-ever line-count per-each electromechanical Central Office telco "panel" switches. Motor, CORK rollers, clutches, and lineshaft driven, third-cousin to a bowling-alley mechanical pin-setter on rails, wouldyah believe. Manhattan Island got most of those. And kept them for a longish time. Line density thing. Old tech, even for run-til-it-breaks telco world, but much, MUCH younger than lifts.

gustafson · Aug 27, 2018

adama said:
Most elevator controls are pretty crude, would have 2 limit switches, a high speed cut - to low speed change over and a low speed - break engager one on the floor level. G

Make perfect sense given the symptoms, that it is the high speed changover switch. Going up, no overshoot, going down overshoot due to inertia.

thermite · Aug 27, 2018

gustafson said:
Make perfect sense given the symptoms, that it is the high speed changover switch. Going up, no overshoot, going down overshoot due to inertia.

Yeah but "not only", as it should then "creep" back to level with the sill before opening doors.

Wife has been dealing with this longer than I have. I was able to train-up a full-time "Facilities Manager" as C&W Americas grew and shed any further personal interface with the contractors.

She keeps getting re-elected "block representative" as the most effective arse-kicker amongst property owners for our towers in Hong Kong. Has to bitch, moan and insist better of the variable give-a-damness Chevalier techs to "get it right".

Hong Kong's terrain and typical tower block floor-count, we live or die by escalators and lifts sourced from every major-maker on-planet. Our population density, we then wear the buggers OUT in record-time, too!

Over 12 million public transport bum-count trips each weekday, typically four lift rides and six escalator rides per-each of those sets of buns to get to/from home, transport, and shops or workplace. Thankfully, they are "shared". VERY!

Unlike the barbarians in Tokyo, we even manage to do it without need of K-Y jelly or trash-compactor official "pushers" at train doors.

DDoug · Aug 27, 2018

Be curious to see how this is built.

Hydraulic, geared, or gearless.

thermite · Aug 27, 2018

digger doug said:
Be curious to see how this is built.

Hydraulic, geared, or gearless.

For 3 or 4 floors only, roller-chain multiplied hydraulics have replaced a lot of the cable-lifts.

"Big deal" in HKG to glass-wall the whole shebang. Purpose seems to be keeping impatient folks quiet watching all the monkey-motion as "progress" so they forget how long they've had to WAIT!

Hong-Kongers are trained-up from childhood to press "door close" as they enter a lift, hoping to cut-off those behind and have more space, could care less if they pinch a child or oldster in the doors. DAMHIKT! I've taken a certain DELIGHT in allowing the doors to TRY to close on my "Gweilo bulk", just STANDING there blank-faced until one of the twitniks hits "door open", their frantic haste actually creating a DELAY!

They refuse to recognize that the 'puter in the lift is optimized, already - even to ignoring their "door close" for a time-out, all the better lifts..

I swear, one could mount "door close" buttons on streetlight stanchions and telephone poles and they'd be worn-out for folks trying to speed-up their life out of reflexive habit!

DDoug · Aug 27, 2018

thermite said:
"Big deal" in HKG to glass-wall the whole shebang. Purpose seems to be keeping impatient folks quiet watching all the monkey-motion as "progress" so they forget how long they've had to WAIT!

Do they have a Shat-your-pants button ?

thermite · Aug 27, 2018

digger doug said:
Do they have a Shat-your-pants button ?

You might want to see a GI-tract medico over that sort of problem.

Chinese food is generally safe because no one DARES have that sort of issue, what with how skeerce the facilities can be, Asian-crowded cities!

DDoug · Aug 27, 2018

thermite said:
You might want to see a GI-tract medico over that sort of problem.

Chinese food is generally safe because no one DARES have that sort of issue, what with how skeerce the facilities can be, Asian-crowded cities!

Well no...I'm the type that would be kneeling on the floor in terror as soon as the car went above 8' AGL.... :eek:

thermite · Aug 27, 2018

digger doug said:
Well no...I'm the type that would be kneeling on the floor in terror as soon as the car went above 8' AGL....

And yet you fly itty-bitty airplanes?

Should fly Culpeper, VA-Linden, NJ chasing a line of thunderstorms, stopwatch, gyro, and whisky compass 'coz half the VOR's have been zapped off line ahead of you, Westminster already gone before you lifted-off.

Then drop down through a haze layer as you start the 9-mile DME arc off Solberg VOR.

Close to the old ARADCOM HQ, Sandy Hook, 1 AM Manhattan Island appears in the windscreen, crystal clear night air, 12 O'clock low, lighted up like some gigantic warship steaming towards you, anti-aircraft batteries at full-gallop. Light show, not shells, thankfully!

Awesome!

The DME arc lines you up to the old Bearcat factory strip at Linden. Right in amongst all those petroleum storage tanks. "Awesome" has a pucker-factor payback. Do NOT f**k up this landing!

Five bucks tie-down, free if you buy fuel.

I bought fuel. Screw Teterboro's fees!

Over Torqued · Aug 27, 2018

As the car approaches the second floor from above, does it stop with a jerk? As said, the car should go from fast to slow as it approaches a floor. Brake engages when power is removed from slow speed mode. If you can hear small clicks as the car travels thru the second floor, you have limit switches - if not, you probably have optical eyes on the car reading from a strip along the height of the trunk. There are a set of eyes above and below the floor to tell it when to decelerate/stop. If it stops with a jerk, your eye reading the second floor approach-from-above slow speed has dirt/grease on it or optical flag needs adjustment. What model elevator is it?

jz79 · Aug 27, 2018

adama said:
Most elevator controls are pretty crude, would have 2 limit switches, a high speed cut - to low speed change over and a low speed - break engager one on the floor level. Guessing you have issues with one of thoes or its trigger flag. If it was all floors it would point to brake issues. As its only one floor could well be just the one switch.

Some lifts have switches on the car - in the shaft, others have a simple windy drum of cable like a dog lead attached to the car and then that has a switch drum that achives the same. Theres some pretty neat ways the lift manufactures use to do this stuff, kinda some of the best electro mechanical porn out there.

Googling your lift OEM should reveal some clues, but would kinda assume you have manuals for it?

I've dealt with couple elevators in the past (repaired shot VFDs for the main motor), and adama is right about the limit switches, there is a "warning" one that starts the deceleration and then the "zero" one for the stop, if the problem is only in one direction, then it is most likely the "warning" one, but that's sort of a wild guess without knowing what sort of drive or even control there is there

and the ones that I've seen didn't have brakes, meaning, it is just hanging on the rope, the brake is engaged only when the speed governor tells it to - that is how the elevator company service tech explained it to me, but that was regarding small lifts, 4-8 people, maybe larger ones use some sort of a safety brake at each stop

one of the elevators had mechanical limit switches, the other one, fancier one, had a stationary magnetic strip and a reader head on the car for controlling speed and stops

thermite · Aug 27, 2018

Over Torqued said:
As the car approaches the second floor from above, does it stop with a jerk? As said, the car should go from fast to slow as it approaches a floor. Brake engages when power is removed from slow speed mode. If you can hear small clicks as the car travels thru the second floor, you have limit switches - if not, you probably have optical eyes on the car reading from a strip along the height of the trunk. There are a set of eyes above and below the floor to tell it when to decelerate/stop. If it stops with a jerk, your eye reading the second floor approach-from-above slow speed has dirt/grease on it or optical flag needs adjustment. What model elevator is it?

Just about every technology as ever was is used on lifts. Roller-arm microswitches (see "Guns of Navarone") to magnetic, optical, Hall-effect - probably even capacitance.

The holy grail is non-wearing and uber-stable to reduce costly service call-outs and user-aggravating lift downtime.

jz79 · Aug 27, 2018

thermite said:
Just about every technology as ever was is used on lifts. Roller-arm microswitches (see "Guns of Navarone") to magnetic, optical, Hall-effect - probably even capacitance.

The holy grail is non-wearing and uber-stable to reduce costly service call-outs and user-aggravating lift downtime.

this can't really be said about the brand I had to deal with, it is one of the common big names at least here in the old world, they had a medium sized model where electronics (VFD for the motor I mentioned earlier) would last about the period of warranty, and then they would fail, and when you call them for the repair, they'll give you the standard line - oh, that was the old model control, we don't support that one any more, you need to replace the whole control with the new model, and for that 2 storey model in particular, it was around 15k EUR

and this was a very common problem with that particular control, solved it for one of the elevators (IGBT and some supporting electronics were shot), the other one - same exact issue, blown IGBT, fixed once, worked fine for couple weeks, then blew up again, and the elevator company tech came down to check if everything was fine after the first repair, and there were zero issues as far as I could tell, but then I gave up on the whole thing, if I can't guarantee the validity of repair, I'm not going to take the job, I guess I got lucky with the first one that didn't blow up (as far as I know)

there are however quite a few parameters to tweak with those VFDs, but it is done all via their proprietary control, and probably those service techs installing them are using some "default" values and not really diagnosing the problem to find the issue, they just suggest to replace the whole thing, afair that there was like 30% failure rate in under 3 years of service for that particular model of the control

thermite · Aug 27, 2018

jz79 said:
this can't really be said about the brand I had to deal with, it is one of the common big names at least here in the old world, they had a medium sized model where electronics (VFD for the motor I mentioned earlier) would last about the period of warranty, and then they would fail, and when you call them for the repair, they'll give you the standard line - oh, that was the old model control, we don't support that one any more, you need to replace the whole control with the new model, and for that 2 storey model in particular, it was around 15k EUR

and this was a very common problem with that particular control, solved it for one of the elevators (IGBT and some supporting electronics were shot), the other one - same exact issue, blown IGBT, fixed once, worked fine for couple weeks, then blew up again, and the elevator company tech came down to check if everything was fine after the first repair, and there were zero issues as far as I could tell, but then I gave up on the whole thing, if I can't guarantee the validity of repair, I'm not going to take the job, I guess I got lucky with the first one that didn't blow up (as far as I know)

there are however quite a few parameters to tweak with those VFDs, but it is done all via their proprietary control, and probably those service techs installing them are using some "default" values and not really diagnosing the problem to find the issue, they just suggest to replace the whole thing, afair that there was like 30% failure rate in under 3 years of service for that particular model of the control

I still have one more new VFD to shitcan. Still in the box. Just forgotten where I left it.

You wouldn't even WANT to know how durable the old Ward-Leonard Dinosaur-Current lift drives could be!

batw · Aug 27, 2018

digger doug said:
Be curious to see how this is built.

Hydraulic, geared, or gearless.

Doug many years ago a fella i know asked me to make a gear for an elevator in a mortuary he worked at in Baltimore Md.

well i pondered for a while people,elevator,people,elevator liabilities.
he brings the old gear about 10" in dia. spur gear simple and he put me at ease completely when its for the clients only they have already arrived at their destination.

DDoug · Aug 27, 2018

batw said:
Doug many years ago a fella i know asked me to make a gear for an elevator in a mortuary he worked at in Baltimore Md.

well i pondered for a while people,elevator,people,elevator liabilities.
he brings the old gear about 10" in dia. spur gear simple and he put me at ease completely when its for the clients only they have already arrived at their destination.

Yes, I watched a brand new Schindler retrofit, they have the name cast right in
the box.

However there have been gearless elevator motors for many years, used to ride one daily.

OT- Home elevator overshooting second floor a bit...how to adjust ?

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