Compact home lifts: what the word actually buys you.

The two kinds of compact lift.

The through-floor lift: a cabin on rails.

The through-floor lift is the one most Australians picture when they hear "compact". The best known local brand is Compact Home Lifts, whose Elegance range is the obvious reference point, but the design is older than that brand and comes out of the UK stairlift industry. The cabin rides on two vertical rails that stand in the room. The rails are fixed to the floor downstairs, pass through a cut-out in the ceiling, and fix again to the ceiling of the room above. There is no shaft. The cabin is simply an object standing in the corner of the lounge, and when you press and hold the button it climbs the rails, passes through the hole, and arrives in the bedroom above.

The clever part, and the part worth understanding before you buy, is how the hole is dealt with. The cabin carries its own floor and its own roof. When the cabin is downstairs, its roof sits flush in the aperture and becomes a patch of floor in the room above. When it is upstairs, its floor becomes a patch of ceiling in the room below. So at any moment one of your two rooms has a section of floor or ceiling that is actually the lift. Stand on that square of carpet upstairs and you are standing on the top of the cabin.

From the published specifications for the two Elegance models, that gives you a 1040 x 760 mm footprint for the two person version and 1040 x 1378 mm for the wheelchair version, a 170 kg or 250 kg load, a top speed of 0.15 m/s or 0.1 m/s, two stops only, hold-to-run push buttons, a half height gate as standard, and a plug into an ordinary power point. Installation takes a day or two once a builder has cut the aperture. The compliance line on the brochure reads "European".

The small shafted lift: a cabin inside a structure.

The other kind of compact lift is a conventional lift that has been made small. The Swift Lite and Swift Pro that we install are the clearest examples. The lift arrives with its own self-supporting shaft, either glazed or powder-coated steel in a RAL colour, so there is still no builder's shaft to construct and no load bearing wall needed. The shaft stands on the slab in a 50 mm pit, or on no pit at all behind a small ramp. The cabin runs inside it on a screw and nut drive with its own battery, through automatic bi-fold doors, and you press the button once rather than holding it.

The smallest Swift car floor is 830 x 600 mm and needs a 940 x 1025 mm hole through the floor. It carries 250 kg, travels at 0.3 m/s, serves two to six floors up to 12 metres, runs on 230 V single phase, and is certified to AS 1735.15, the Australian standard written for exactly this class of home lift. Supplied and installed from eight weeks, with parts held in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and South Australia.

Footprint, side by side.

This is the comparison people assume will favour the rail lift, so it is worth doing properly. Figures for the Elegance range are from the manufacturer's published brochure. Swift figures are the hole you need through the floor, which is the number that matters for a retrofit.

Will a wheelchair fit? Decide that before the hole is cut.

Most people shopping for a compact lift are doing it because the stairs have become a problem. The honest next question is what happens if a walking frame becomes a chair, because that is the single most common reason a lift that was fine for ten years stops being fine. A lift is a 20 year purchase and the hole through the floor is the expensive part to change. So size it for the chair now, or at least know what you are giving up.

The standard Elegance has a 770 x 710 mm car. No wheelchair is going in there. The Elegance Plus is the one the brochure calls one of the smallest vertical wheelchair lifts on the market, and it is: an internal car of 770 x 1040 mm, an 816 mm entrance, a 55 mm ramp and a 250 kg load. A typical manual wheelchair is around 600 to 700 mm wide and 1050 to 1200 mm long with the footrests on. The Australian access standard, AS 1428.1, plans around an occupied wheelchair footprint of 800 x 1300 mm. The Plus car is narrower than that and shorter than that.

So a manual chair fits, in one orientation, with the footrests at the door and nothing to spare. There is no room for a carer to ride with you, no room to turn, and you leave the way you came in, backwards, unless you have paid for the through-car version. A powered chair or a mobility scooter is out. That is not us being unkind about the product. It is 770 by 1040 doing exactly what 770 by 1040 can do.

Chair fit is our reading of the published car sizes against a typical manual wheelchair. Bring the actual chair to a showroom; that settles it in two minutes.

The Swift comes in six car sizes, and the choice is yours at the time of ordering. Size M takes a manual chair in the same 1.43 m² footprint as the Elegance Plus. Step up to L or XL and the load goes to 400 kg, which is a chair and a person standing beside it, and the XL at 1400 x 1100 mm has room to spare. Because the lift is a shaft with a door on each floor, you roll in and roll out facing forward, and the doors open themselves.

If you want more than that, or a powered chair, the Phoenix is built to order at our Brisbane factory with a car up to 1.6 m², up to 630 kg, and swing doors that can be fitted on two sides of the car so you never reverse out. The door widths and car sizes are adjusted to the chair, not the other way round.

If floor space inside is the problem, put the lift outside.

This is the option most people do not know exists. The Gemini is a compact two level lift built in Brisbane for the outside of the house: a weatherproof modular aluminium shaft rated for cyclonic wind up to C3, 350 kg, up to 4 m of travel, from $45,000 installed. It takes no floor space inside at all. The Phoenix can also go outside, with up to 7 m of travel for a three level home. Both land on a deck or verandah with a door into the house on each level, so the wheelchair question is answered without touching a single room. Craned in and bolted to a slab, which is often less building work than cutting a hole through a suspended floor.

Resale, and what a buyer sees.

We are not going to tell you a lift adds a specific dollar figure to a house, because there is no Australian data that supports a number and we would be wary of anyone who quotes one. What we can tell you is what agents and buyers react to, because we hear it when a house with one of our lifts changes hands.

A glass or steel shaft beside the stairs photographs well, goes in the listing as a feature, and lets a buyer who is 45 and fit picture themselves at 75 without the house feeling like a care facility. A set of rails with a cabin in the lounge is the thing a buyer asks about removing, and removal means a builder patching a floor and a ceiling. The lift is also the only part of your house that is 100 percent certain to be inspected by the next owner's building inspector, and "certified to the Australian standard" is a shorter conversation than "complies with European regulation".

There is a future-proofing angle too. A two stop rail lift serves the house as it is today. A shafted lift rated for up to six stops and 12 metres of travel can serve a third level if the next owner adds one, or a garage underneath if you do. That is not a reason to buy a lift, but it is a reason the shafted one holds its value better once it is in.

Cost, without the mystery.

A Swift Lite starts from $41,000 installed, plus GST where it applies, and a Swift Pro from $51,000. "Installed" covers the lift and its installation; the builder's work to cut and finish the hole through the floor is separate, and that work is the same job whichever kind of lift you buy. Lifts supplied for a qualifying medical need can be GST-free, and that applies to both kinds.

Through-floor lifts are usually marketed as the budget option, and on the headline figure they sometimes are. Once you line up both quotes with the same inclusions, the builder's aperture on both sides, electrical, the warranty terms, and a servicing agreement, the gap tends to be smaller than the advertising suggests. We would rather you got both numbers in writing and compared what is actually in them than take our word for it. The one thing we will say plainly is that the shaft is where the money goes, and it is also where the value sits.

Safety and the standard on the certificate.

Both kinds of lift carry a battery so a blackout does not strand you. Both have sensors above and below the cabin and some form of barrier across the doorway. Where they differ is in the detail, and the detail is mostly a function of which rulebook they were built to.

Hold-to-run versus automatic. A hold-to-run lift stops the instant you lift your finger, which is a safety feature in the absence of a shaft: if something is under the car, you are the sensor. An automatic lift inside a shaft does not need you to be the sensor, so you press once and it goes.

Gate versus door. A half height hinged gate with a light curtain is the standard fit on a rail lift. A shafted lift has full height automatic bi-fold doors that check the doorway before the car moves. If there are children or a dog in the house, that matters.

Two independent brakes. The Swift drive has braking doubled up, so a fault on one still leaves the car held. Ask any lift supplier the same question and listen for a clear answer.

AS 1735.15. This is the Australian standard for low rise, low speed home lifts. The Swift is certified to it. The Elegance brochure lists its regulation as European. That may be perfectly good engineering, but it means the lift was tested against someone else's rulebook, and it is worth asking your supplier what that means for your building certifier and your insurer.

When a through-floor lift is still the right call.

We sell the other kind, so take this with that in mind, but there are a few situations where a rail lift is a fair choice. If you need a lift in a fortnight rather than eight weeks and the supplier has stock, that is real. If you have a wardrobe or linen cupboard stacked exactly above another one and can hide the whole thing, the exposed rail problem goes away. And if you are confident the house will never go to market and you simply want the cheapest route between two floors, the rail lift is a known quantity with a long history behind it.

For almost everyone else, the extra 17 centimetres and a shaft is the better buy. It is the version of a compact lift that you would choose for your own house if you were starting from the result rather than the floor plan.

Nine questions to ask before you sign for any compact lift.

1. Which Australian or international standard is the lift certified to, and can I see the certificate?
2. Is the control hold-to-run or automatic? Can I try both in a showroom?
3. What is the hole through the floor, in millimetres, and who cuts and finishes it?
4. What does the room look like when the car is on the other level?
5. How many stops can it serve, and what is the maximum travel if I ever add a level?
6. What is the rated speed, and how long is the trip on my floor-to-floor height?
7. Will a wheelchair fit, facing forward, with someone beside it? What is the internal car size, not the footprint?
8. Who installs it, who services it, and where are the spare parts held?
9. Does the "installed" price include the builder's work, electrical and the first service?