Maintenance in the elevator trade

The second half of Tamsin's fourth year began with a change of desk. For three years she had worked on installation, modernization and repair crews, moving from job to job with Ray Abernethy and the adjusters. Now Lena Ostrander put her on Route 7 as the second mechanic beside Ray, and told her that for the rest of the year she would learn the part of the trade that most elevator mechanics spend most of their working lives doing: keeping equipment that already runs safe, reliable and legal. “Installing an elevator takes months,” Lena said. “Maintaining it takes thirty or forty years. Every test you have watched, every device you have adjusted, has to be done again and again for as long as the equipment is in service, and somebody has to be able to prove it was done.” The term would end with two jobs on the same week: an audit of the whole route's maintenance records by Northcrest's maintenance quality manager, Hugh Mbeki, and the acceptance inspection of a new car at Larchmont's second building. This lesson describes what maintenance is, who is responsible for it, how a route is organized and how much work it takes.

What maintenance means in the code

The code uses the word maintenance for the work that keeps equipment in compliance with the code in force when it was installed or last altered, and in safe working order. That includes examinations, lubrication, cleaning, adjustment, the replacement of worn parts with parts of the same kind, and the periodic tests in Part 8. It does not include alterations, which change the equipment and bring in current requirements, and it is separate from repairs and replacements, which have their own rules and which were sorted out in ELV-410 lesson 11. The maintenance requirements themselves are in Section 8.6, which applies to every kind of equipment the code covers: electric and hydraulic elevators, escalators and moving walks, dumbwaiters and material lifts, and special application equipment. Section 8.6 also requires a written maintenance control program for each unit, which lesson 2 covers.

In practice, maintenance work falls into three kinds. Preventive maintenance is the scheduled work: examining, cleaning, lubricating and adjusting on a fixed interval, before anything fails. Periodic tests are the scheduled proofs that safety devices still work: the annual, three-year and five-year tests that lessons 5 to 9 cover. Corrective maintenance is the unscheduled work: callbacks when a car is out of service or a passenger is trapped, and the repairs that follow. A well-run route shifts work from the third kind to the first, because an hour spent cleaning a door track on a planned visit saves several hours of callback and a stranded passenger later.

Who is responsible

The owner of an elevator is responsible for keeping it maintained and safe. Almost no owner does the work directly. Instead the owner hires an elevator contractor, and the contractor's licensed mechanics do the maintenance and tests under the contractor's program. In Washington, the owner must keep each conveyance maintained by a licensed elevator contractor and its mechanics, licensed by L&I, and inside Seattle the conveyance must also pass SDCI's annual inspection to keep its certificate of operation; L&I's maintenance control program forms set out what must be kept on site for each unit. The authority having jurisdiction does not maintain anything: it licenses the contractors and mechanics, inspects equipment, audits records and issues orders when something is wrong.

The contract between owner and contractor decides how much of the work the contractor carries. A full maintenance contract covers examinations, lubrication, adjustment, tests and the repair or replacement of most parts, so the contractor carries the cost of wear. A parts-oil-and-grease contract covers routine work and small parts but bills larger repairs separately. An examination-only or time-and-material arrangement leaves almost everything to the owner. Whatever the contract says, the code and the regulation still require the maintenance to be done, and a mechanic who finds a hazard must deal with it whether or not the contract covers it. Moira's line from the code block was that “the contract decides who pays; the code decides what gets done.”

Route 7

Ray's route was a fair sample of the trade. It had fourteen units in eleven buildings, all within a short drive of the Northcrest shop: Tillicum's two cars, the old geared car 1 and the gearless car 2; the hydraulic car at the Marlowe; the machine-room-less car at Larchmont Residences, with a second car about to start up in the new Larchmont East building; Ashgrove Clinic's twin-post holeless hydraulic; Dunmore Square's roped hydraulic; Holloway Memorial Hospital's two hydraulic bed cars; two hydraulic cars at Birchwood Apartments; a geared traction car at the Pemberton Block; two traction cars at Seaview Medical; and a freight elevator at a bakery warehouse. The route had cars from four makers, controllers from 1962 to 2025, and owners ranging from a hospital with a facilities department to a small strata council that met once a month.

Each unit had a maintenance control program on file, a log on site and a place in Ray's schedule. Most units got a planned visit every month; the busiest hospital cars got two; a few lightly used hydraulic cars could go longer under the maker's limits and the jurisdiction's maximum. Around those visits Ray fitted the periodic tests, the callbacks and the repair work the visits turned up. On a typical week he spent about two-thirds of his time on planned work and a third on callbacks and repairs, and he was proud of how small the callback share had become since he took the route over.

How much work a route takes

Contractors estimate the time each unit needs from its type, the number of stops, its usage and the condition of the equipment, and then add the periodic tests and an allowance for callbacks. The figures vary widely between makers and contractors, so every company keeps its own, but the method is the same: add up the planned hours, add the tests, add the callbacks, and compare the total with the hours a mechanic is actually available. Lena asked Tamsin to work out whether Route 7 would still fit one mechanic and a helper once the Larchmont East car was added.

# Route 7: planned maintenance hours per year, with tests and callbacks (illustrative company figures)
units = [  # (unit, type, stops, visits per year, hours per visit, callbacks per year)
    ("Tillicum 1",      "geared traction", 10, 12, 2.5, 6),
    ("Tillicum 2",      "gearless",        10, 12, 1.8, 3),
    ("Marlowe 1",       "hydraulic",        4, 12, 1.5, 4),
    ("Larchmont 1",     "MRL traction",     8, 12, 1.6, 3),
    ("Ashgrove 1",      "holeless hyd",     3, 12, 1.2, 2),
    ("Dunmore 1",       "roped hyd",        5, 12, 1.5, 3),
    ("Holloway 1",      "hydraulic",        4, 24, 1.5, 5),
    ("Holloway 2",      "hydraulic",        4, 24, 1.5, 4),
    ("Birchwood 1",     "hydraulic",        5, 12, 1.4, 3),
    ("Birchwood 2",     "hydraulic",        5, 12, 1.4, 3),
    ("Pemberton 1",     "geared traction",  7, 12, 2.2, 5),
    ("Seaview 1",       "gearless",         9, 12, 1.8, 4),
    ("Seaview 2",       "gearless",         9, 12, 1.8, 4),
    ("Bakery freight",  "hydraulic",        2, 12, 1.3, 2),
]
TEST_HOURS = {"annual": 4.0, "five-year": 10.0}   # per unit, two-person work counted as crew hours
CALLBACK_HOURS = 2.0                               # average including travel
AVAILABLE = 1600                                # productive hours per mechanic per year

def route_hours(units, five_year_share=0.2):
    planned = sum(v * h for _, _, _, v, h, _ in units)
    tests = len(units) * (TEST_HOURS["annual"] + five_year_share * TEST_HOURS["five-year"])
    calls = sum(c for *_, c in units) * CALLBACK_HOURS
    return planned, tests, calls

for label, extra in (("today", []), ("with Larchmont East", [("Larchmont E1", "MRL traction", 6, 12, 1.6, 4)])):
    p, t, c = route_hours(units + extra)
    total = p + t + c
    print(f"{label:22s} planned {p:6.1f} h  tests {t:5.1f} h  callbacks {c:5.1f} h  total {total:6.1f} h  "
          f"= {100 * total / AVAILABLE:4.1f} % of one mechanic")

today                  planned  312.0 h  tests  84.0 h  callbacks 102.0 h  total  498.0 h  = 31.1 % of one mechanic
with Larchmont East    planned  331.2 h  tests  90.0 h  callbacks 110.0 h  total  531.2 h  = 33.2 % of one mechanic

The answer was that the planned visits, tests and callbacks on Route 7 came to about 31 % of one mechanic's productive year, rising to about 33 % with Larchmont East. That surprised Tamsin until Lena pointed out what the model left out: the repairs that the visits and tests turn up, the modernization support at Tillicum, travel between jobs beyond the average, standby for the hospital, and training. On Ray's real timesheets those filled most of the rest of the year, and Tamsin's hours sat on top for the repair work. The details mattered more than the total: Tillicum car 1's planned hours were high because of its age and the hospital cars' because of their double visits, and either could change after the coming modernization or a change in the hospital's contract. Lena kept the model and updated it every year from the route's actual hours, which is the only way such estimates stay honest.

A day on the route

Tamsin's first week showed her the rhythm. A planned visit starts with the log: what was done last time, what is due this time, and any note from the owner or from the last callback. Then the mechanic rides the car, listening and watching, before touching anything, because a car that misbehaves only in normal service will often behave perfectly once it is on inspection operation. The work itself follows the task list in the maintenance control program for that unit, in a sensible order around the machine room or control space, the car top, the pit, the inside of the car and the landings. At the end the car is checked out, put back in service and ridden again, and the log is completed before the mechanic leaves. Ray's habit was to tell the building contact what he had done and what he had found, every time, even when there was nothing to report.

Callbacks break into that rhythm. On her second day a call came from Birchwood: car 2 stuck at the third floor with its doors closed and a resident inside. Ray left the Pemberton machine room, drove eight minutes, released the passenger, and found a hall door roller that had broken and let the door hang onto its interlock. He replaced the roller, examined the other hall doors on that car, logged the callback with its cause, and added a roller check to the next visit for car 1. That last step, Ray said, is what turns a callback into maintenance.

The jurisdiction's view

From the authority's side, maintenance is judged mainly by its records. An SDCI inspector visiting Tillicum will read the log and the maintenance control program before looking at the equipment, check that tasks were done at their intervals and that periodic tests were done and recorded with their values, and then examine the equipment to see whether the records are believable. An immaculate log beside a filthy pit, or a test record with no values, tells the inspector more than any amount of explanation. Lesson 11 returns to working with inspectors; lesson 12 follows Hugh's audit, which asks the same questions before the inspector does.