In any business decision, time, cost, and convenience are among the most significant factors for consideration.

With elevators, it all comes down to a simple question: “What are you moving?”

If you need to move people between floors, then a passenger lift is normally a great option.

However, if you need to move products between floors, then passenger lifts typically aren’t the best solution for your application.

The Doors

There are several reasons, but one of the biggest disadvantages of passenger lifts is the doors.

Passenger lift door openings are typically quite narrow, which is often an issue when moving goods. In almost every goods hoist application, you have to be able to load and unload quickly. Cautiously manoeuvring through a narrow opening is just not practical. Goods hoist doors are designed for maximum width openings, and to handle the knocks and bumps that will inevitably come during quick loading and unloading.

Generally, passenger lift doors also close automatically. This is very convenient when moving people, but it is problematic when moving goods. Using passenger lift doors significantly increases the risk of breaking a door, since they often close unexpectedly just as the user has built momentum while manhandling a heavy load into the lift. Replacing the damaged automatic door is inconvenient and costly, but the worst part is that it normally takes a long time. That’s a major problem for most businesses. Using manually operated, robust goods hoist doors for this kind of application is far more appropriate.

Floor Area

Typically, passenger lifts for capacities up to 1000kg are reasonably affordable. However, once the capacity reaches 1600kg, the pricing generally becomes significantly more expensive. Any unit with a capacity of 2000kg or more is typically considered expensive by any company’s definition.

Additionally, the standard internal car size for the 1000kg passenger lift is 1100mm wide by 2100mm deep, with 900mm wide doors. This unfortunately doesn’t work if you were planning to move the commonly used 1000mm by 1200mm pallets in your lift.

Let’s ignore the issue with the doors as discussed in part 1, and let’s say you asked your supplier to increase the car width. For them to do this for a passenger lift, they would have to either decrease your car depth, or increase the capacity of the unit. This is because the maximum passenger lift floor area is directly linked to the capacity of the unit.

Goods hoists, on the other hand, are not restricted in this way.

Goods hoist suppliers are very flexible when it comes to car dimensions. If we had to define a standard for a 1000kg load, that would be 1500mm wide by 1500mm deep with a 1500mm wide door opening, perfect for the standard pallet size. However, the unit could also be smaller if your shaft space is very limited. Or if you have the space and you are moving something light, perhaps household appliances such as fridges, then you could also have a 1000kg goods hoist that’s 2000mm wide x 2000mm deep, or essentially any reasonable size that suits you.

Cost

When needing to move goods between floors, there are a few options available to you.

Option one is to use a passenger lift, either in its standard form or in its strengthened form if you are moving heavier loads. At the very least, the strengthened form requires reinforced steel plate flooring instead of the standard floor options. Additionally, the standard door sills almost always need to be upgraded from aluminium to steel or cast iron. However, the biggest change is that the structure of the lift needs to be strengthened too. In parts 1 and 2 of this series, we discussed the potential problems linked to the lift capacity vs floor area and the use of automatic doors. Here we note that these upgrades normally increase the price quite significantly, and passenger lifts are almost always more expensive than goods hoists to start with.

Another option, which we really can’t recommend, is to take a chance with what many refer to as an electric or chain hoist. For this option, instead of buying a lift, the purchaser chooses to rather buy a simplified version of a lifting machine that will be fixed to a structure of some kind somewhere above where the goods will be lifted. The advantage is that this approach is normally cheaper. One of the two biggest disadvantages is that they have none of the safety features of a goods hoist or passenger lift, so they introduce a major risk of product damage at best and injury/death at worst. Additionally, most countries have regulations when it comes to moving goods in this way. More often than not, the electric or chain hoist option is not actually legal in most countries. If there was an accident and someone was hurt or killed by this equipment, this would typically lead to an investigation and major issues for the building/business owner. A third major issue applies to users who need to load and unload quickly and often. Sustained, hard usage requires a product that is genuinely built for the purpose.

This is where goods hoists fit in. Cheaper than a passenger lift but justifiably more expensive than just a hoisting machine. Goods hoists have very similar safety features to passenger lifts, but where the passenger lift prioritised aesthetics, the goods hoist prioritises strength and function. Where the hoisting machine route prioritises cost at the expense of everything else, the goods hoist strikes the balance between cost and safety while also offering long term reliability even under sustained, hard use.