Blog

Is your lift as safe as it could be? Find out how to easily improve lift safety in existing lifts without undergoing a full modernisation.

Find out what actions should take place to extend the life of your emergency lift phone equipment to maintain its reliability.

Automated door operation is one of the most interacted with pieces of a lift. As doors are liable to hit people, unsurprisingly, they have become the number one source of lift-related lawsuits. To minimise the risk of injury, EN81-20 Standard provides guidelines to protect passengers. In this post we review how to ensure compliance and how these solutions work.

In this webinar, Matt Davies, Head of Strategic Marketing at AVIRE, presents an overview of the lift monitoring landscape as it exists today, and gives a balanced review of the different options available. Cutting through some of the hype around new technology, we have a look at the real value to an end user.

EN81-20 Standard provides instructions on lift door safety to protect passengers. Find out how to ensure compliance and how the safety equipment works.

Building owners sometimes ask if they can connect their emergency phone system to the VoIP network in their building. This presents several risks they should be aware of.

In this blog post we help facility managers and lift owners understand how they can check their emergency lift phones are setup correctly to ensure they continue to work after the digital switch. By following these 3 easy steps, they will be able to understand what the main areas of risk are and how to correct these.

Lift owners need to take action as the digital switch compromises the operability of their emergency lift phones. Here we answer their most common questions on how to ensure the phones continue to work and what are the main considerations with adapting the existing setup.

With the digital switch taking place in many countries, it’s an opportunity to take a snapshot and review the different stages at which the process is advancing throughout Europe.

Every lift owner should be aware of the top issues present when using Analogue Telephone Adaptors (ATA) in their lift emergency phone setup

Back in the early 2000s, GSM lift phones received a lot of criticism from organisations and users due to poor 2G network coverage and mobile networks deregistering the SIM cards of inactive phones. However, times have changed. With the digital switch in the UK replacing copper landlines with fibre lines, 2G coverage reaching 99% throughout most of the country, and major advancements in GSM technology preventing SIM deregistering, GSM solutions have emerged as the most complete lift phone technology on the market. This article will examine some of the top trends driving the adoption of emergency GSM lift phones, from the digital switch, to growing 2G signal coverage, signal rescan, and more.

In this post we explore the challenges P100 will face as we move into the digital switch and what solutions are available for emergency lift phones to ensure continued operability.

We reached out to the industry body, the LEIA (Lift and Escalator Industry Association), so we could better understand the challenges they might face in moving to Digital Phonelines by 2025. We wanted to find out the things that we, and the Communications Providers we serve, need to be aware of.

We share the advice provided by the Lift and Escalator Industry Association (LEIA) on the digital switch. As the telephone line is typically the responsibility of the building owner (not the lift maintenance company), here you can find some guidance on the actions that need to be taken to ensure ongoing operability.

A Lift Monitoring System (LMS) provides the current status of a lift installation… but this useful tool could be the key to preventing lift breakdowns!

Whilst the deployment of fibre lines began in the 1990s it is in the last 5 years that the rate of fibre installs has really stepped up. Until now this has not affected the lift industry, but in 2020 Openreach (the organisation responsible for the UK PSTN infrastructure) began to withdraw support for analogue signalling/services across the UK landline network regardless of whether the line was copper or fibre.

If your lift is starting to show its age, a full replacement will seem like an expensive proposition. But you can renew and extend the life-span of your lift by modernising it instead. How do you get buy-in on lift modernisation?

As telecoms networks evolve to meet the latest demands of consumers and businesses the level of support for DTMF signalling (in fact all analogue signalling) is changing and sadly not for the better.

Social distancing has potentially become the most used term of 2020 so far, and with the re-opening of buildings and the need to re-adjust to a ‘new normal’ it is a vital behaviour that will be a part of daily life for quite a while to come

A few decades ago, touchscreen technology was only prevalent in science fiction. Nowadays daily life regularly features touchscreens, whether it be homes, cars, planes, stores, restaurants – they are ingrained into our daily lives.

Smart buildings are sometimes referred to as 'automated buildings', 'intelligent buildings' or buildings that incorporate smart technology. A smart building is any structure that uses automated processes to automatically control the building’s operations including heating, ventilation, air conditioning, lighting, vertical transportation and other systems.

Most autodiallers (also known as emergency telephones) will be installed without issue but if you do run into trouble here are some helpful tips that our technical team have compiled to assist you in resolving any problems.

In June 2019 BT Openreach announced that the traditional analogue phone network (or PSTN) will reach the end of it’s life by December 2025.

As the elevator industry advances towards connectivity and the Internet of Things (IoT), it is important to understand the cellular network types used.

Vandalism is a major concern for lift owners; damage through misuse and abuse impacts both the availability of lifts, and passenger safety. EN81-71:2018 is a harmonised European Standard which outlines additional protective measures to improve the vandal resistance of lift installations.

LCD display installations are becoming much more popular when replacing traditional dot matrix displays. With the growth of LCD displays there is clearly an improved visual benefit as you can display richer graphical content but there is also the opportunity for advertising on screens. This can be specifically targeted at demographics based on the installation space.

Cloud computing is the delivery of computing services – servers, storage, databases, networking, software, analytics and more – over the Internet (“the cloud”).

Since 2003, Part 28 has been the industry’s reference for installing, testing, and designing emergency telephones. Now in 2018 we are seeing a major revision. How will the revision affect you?

Lift emergency phone regulations require that emergency-communication phones be available at all times for lift passengers in the event they become trapped in a lift. Traditionally this requirement is met with the employment of fixed landlines as the means of transmission for lift emergency phones.

The implementation of faster and more efficient 3G and 4G networks have reduced the demand for 2G. Providers have reassessed the need to provide 2G and are gradually decommissioning the 2G network.

The Radio Equipment Directive (RED) establishes a regulatory framework for “making available on the market” and “putting into service” radio equipment in the European Union.  It replaced the prior directive (R&TTE 1999/5/EC) and was effective 13 June 2017.

How do Avire’s light curtains achieve enhanced light immunity?

As of September 2017 all new lifts must comply with EN81-20 and EN81-50 Elevator Standards. These standards were approved in 2014 to replace EN81-1 and EN81-2, and after a grace period for the elevator maintenance and installation industry to prepare, these elevator standards are now mandatory for all new lifts.

In August 2014 two new standards covering lift design (EN 81-20:2014) and installation requirements (EN 81-50:2014) were released in Europe. These replace EN 81-1:1998+A3:2009 and EN 81-2:1998+A3:2009, which were 15 years old and needed upgrading to comply with modern safety requirements. It is expected that the new standards will also be adopted in China, South America and Australia.