Lift and escalator maintenance: what owners should know

What escalator maintenance is actually buying, what rust-coloured dust on lift ropes means, and how to tell whether a lift is still fit for the building it serves. Written for owners, body corporates and facility managers.

Maintenance

Most of what maintenance is buying on an escalator is invisible until the day it is needed. When it has not been done, the first sign is usually an incident rather than a warning.

The safety devices you cannot see

An escalator carries a set of protective devices that do nothing at all in normal running. Comb impact devices stop the machine if something is forced between the comb and the step. Skirt obstruction devices stop it if an object is dragged between the step and the side panel. Handrail speed monitoring, step level detection, broken step chain and drive chain detection, missing step detection: none of them announce themselves, and all of them are only there for the moment something goes wrong.

These are exactly the devices that quietly stop working when maintenance is deferred or superficial. Nothing changes for the passenger. The machine runs the same. What has changed is that the protection is no longer there.

What poor maintenance actually looks like

• Service records that log attendance rather than what was checked, found and done.
• Safety device tests that are not listed individually, so it is impossible to tell which were performed.
• Combs with missing or broken teeth left in service.
• Skirt clearances outside tolerance, or skirt panels deflecting under hand pressure.
• Handrails running visibly slower than the steps.
• Steps sitting at inconsistent levels through the transition.
• Lubrication and cleaning intervals that appear on the schedule but never in the record.

An owner cannot inspect most of this and should not try. What an owner can do is read the reporting and notice whether it describes work or merely records a visit.

Clothing, shoes and the comb

Entrapment of a shoe, a shoelace, a long hem or a bag strap at the comb or the skirt is the most common escalator injury mechanism, and it is precisely the mechanism those hidden devices exist to interrupt. Soft-soled shoes, loose clothing and children standing at the edge raise the risk; functioning comb and skirt devices are what keep a caught shoe from becoming something worse.

A short historical note

The first escalator was patented as an inclined elevator by Jesse Reno and installed at Coney Island in 1896 as a novelty ride. It was not immediately popular; people were wary of stepping onto a moving staircase. It took until the early twentieth century for department stores and railway stations to make it ordinary. The wariness was not unreasonable at the time, and everything that made it unreasonable since has been protective engineering.

What to ask for

Ask for the maintenance schedule for your escalators, with each safety device named, the test interval stated, and the results recorded by date. If the reporting you receive cannot tell you when the comb impact device was last tested, you do not know whether it works.

Rope Rouge

Reddish-brown dust in a lift machine room or on the ropes has a name, a cause, and a decision attached to it. It is one of the more useful things an owner can learn to recognise.

What it is

Rope rouge is the fine reddish-brown powder that appears on steel suspension ropes, on the sheave, and settling on surfaces nearby. It is iron oxide — the wires inside the rope wearing against each other and against the sheave groove, and the resulting particles oxidising. It looks a little like rust, and in a sense it is, but the mechanism is abrasion rather than corrosion of a stationary surface.

What causes it

A steel wire rope is made of many small wires laid into strands and strands laid into a rope. Under load and over a sheave, those wires move relative to each other very slightly on every pass. Where lubrication has been lost, or where the sheave grooves have worn so the rope is gripped more tightly than intended, that internal movement increases and the wires abrade.

Contributing factors are usually some combination of insufficient or incorrect lubrication, worn or undercut sheave grooves, misalignment, and simple accumulated service. Heavily used equipment produces it sooner.

Why it matters

The dust itself is not the problem. What the dust indicates is that material is being lost from inside the rope, where it cannot be seen. Rope condition is assessed on criteria including broken wires, reduction in diameter, corrosion and distortion, and internal wear reduces the effective cross-section without necessarily showing broken wires on the outside.

Rope rouge is therefore a signal to look properly rather than a fault in itself. It says the ropes are working harder than they should be, and it prompts the question of why.

What should be done about it

The wrong response is to wipe it away and carry on, and it is a surprisingly common one. The right response is a proper rope inspection against the relevant criteria, an assessment of the sheave grooves, and a review of the lubrication regime — because if the sheaves are the cause, replacing the ropes alone will produce the same result again in short order.

Where ropes need replacing, they are normally replaced as a set. Mixing new and used ropes on the same drive causes uneven load sharing, which is its own problem.

What to ask your contractor

• When were the ropes last formally inspected, and against what criteria?
• What was the measured rope diameter compared with nominal, and how many broken wires were found in the measured lengths?
• What condition are the sheave grooves in, and have they been measured?
• What is the lubrication regime, and when was it last carried out?
• If the ropes are approaching replacement, is that in the forward plan and the budget, or will it arrive as an unexpected quotation?

Those are ordinary questions and any competent contractor will have the answers. If the response is that the ropes look fine, ask for the measurements. Rope condition is assessed with instruments, not by eye.

Fit for purpose?

A lift can be perfectly serviceable and still be wrong for the building it sits in. Fitness for purpose is a different question from condition, and it is the one that tends to get skipped.

Two different questions

Condition asks whether the equipment is working as designed and how much life is left in it. Fitness for purpose asks whether what it was designed to do is still what the building needs. A well-maintained lift installed for a building whose use has since changed can pass every condition check and still be failing its occupants every morning.

Owners usually get told about condition, because that is what a maintenance contractor is engaged to observe. Fitness for purpose is nobody’s job unless somebody asks.

Signs the equipment no longer suits the building

• Queues at a predictable time of day that were not there five years ago.
• A change of use in part of the building — a floor converted to a gym, a childcare centre, a medical suite, a food court — creating a demand the original design never anticipated.
• Occupancy density that has risen as tenancies have been subdivided.
• Accessibility expectations the original car size, door width or controls do not meet.
• A goods or service requirement now being met by a passenger lift because there is nothing else.

Age is not the same as condition, and neither is the same as suitability

An older lift that has been well maintained can be entirely safe and entirely adequate. A newer one that has been neglected may be neither. And a lift that is both new and well maintained can still be the wrong size, in the wrong place, or too slow for what the building now asks of it.

Keeping those three ideas separate is most of what a useful assessment does.

Obsolescence sits underneath all of it

The point at which the control equipment can no longer be supported changes the arithmetic. Once parts are difficult to obtain, downtime lengthens, repair costs become unpredictable, and the practical field of contractors who can maintain the equipment narrows. That is worth knowing before it happens, not when a fault takes a car out of service for six weeks.

Ask your contractor directly whether the controller is still supported by its manufacturer, and get the answer in writing.

What to do about it

The answer is a condition and performance assessment that treats the building as it is used today rather than as it was designed. That means looking at the equipment, the demand it actually serves, the pattern of faults, the support position for the control system, and the realistic remaining life — and then setting out the options with what each one costs and what it buys.

Modernisation, replacement and doing nothing for another three years are all legitimate outcomes. What is not legitimate is finding out which one you needed after the equipment has made the decision for you.