Lifts are a complex interaction between software, electronics and mechanical components. A quality lift is the result of experience accumulated over the past 100 years. The designing of a lift combines specialist lift engineers from a range of disciplines, ensuring the design is safe, reliable and robust.

The lift installation process must be thorough and careful to ensure no items, no matter how small are missed. This involves layers of checking and checking again to ensure all is installed exactly as the designer has specified.

To complicate things further there is the human element in the manufacturing and the installation process. Lifts, unlike mass produced items, such as modern cars, are not high-volume mass productions by robots. Many elements of lifts are still made and assembled by hand in factories and then transported long distances to building sites, where lift mechanics install the lift piece by piece. The factor of human error is very significant, just one door adjustment, or an incorrect parameter in the drive, can cause a lift to stop or function unpredictably, or develop an annoying intermittent fault.

Lift companies that work to market dictated price points by customers generally engage in cost cutting by buying cheap gear and then paying as little as possible to the cheapest installers they can find. Cost cutting can also occur in the design process by using non specialist lift engineers that do not understand the complete picture of why lifts are made the way they are ensuring multiple layers of redundancy/safety. A good design takes serious time, money and experience.

In summary, if a lift is selected on price it is likely that the equipment is of poor quality and the installation has not been done thoroughly. The result can be a lift that is unreliable requiring many costly repairs and most likely, is never going to run as the customer requires. If you can source a lift that has significant items supplied by German, Swiss or Scandinavian counties you are off to a good start. Companies that supply high quality equipment will generally take the time to install it well.

However, even equipment that is high quality and installed well can have issues that are not the fault of the company that has supplied the lift. When lifts are re designed by manufactures there are sometimes software and hardware issues, potentially creating intermittent faults that take months to track down or that may not appear for years. Intermittent faults often require highly skilled technicians to take the time to patiently observe and work through processes to find solutions. Often this is beyond the technical abilities of some companies or their willingness to invest the time to help their customers.

If you are having long term issues with your lift I recommend getting on the phone and talking to companies until you find someone who understands your make of lift and then try to figure out how technically competent they are.

Published: February 26, 2026