Industry Guides
Types of Lift, and Which One a Building Actually Needs
Passenger, freight and home lifts differ in what they are built to carry rather than in how well they work. Passenger lifts move people between floors, freight lifts are built around load and how it is driven in, and home lifts are specified for light domestic duty in a much smaller shaft.
- Written by
- Calvin A. W
- Technical review
- Tommy C
- Published
- Updated
- Reading time
- 6 min
Passenger lifts
The common case, and the one traffic analysis exists for. Capacity runs from around four people to more than twenty, and the right figure follows from the building's population, its floor count and the share of it arriving in the peak five minutes — not from a catalogue default.
Within the category, the variation that matters is duty rather than finish. A bed lift in a hospital and a passenger lift of identical rated load are different machines, because rated load describes weight and a bed needs floor plan.
Freight lifts
A freight lift is specified around how the load arrives, not only how heavy it is. A pallet placed by hand and the same pallet driven in by a forklift impose very different demands: the forklift concentrates force through its wheels, and its own weight may enter the car.
Environment does the rest. Dust, humidity, washdown and temperature all shorten the life of equipment not chosen for them, and specifying a warehouse lift for a facility that is hosed down weekly produces early failures that look like build quality and are really specification.
Home lifts
A home lift is not a smaller commercial lift. It is specified for light, intermittent domestic duty, which is what allows a far smaller shaft footprint, a shallower pit and lower headroom — frequently the difference between a lift being possible in an existing house and not.
The Tenka range runs from 320 to 630 kg, with Tsuki working inside an 800 x 900 mm shaft and needing no pit at all. Those figures matter more than capacity for a retrofit, because a conventional lift pit alone rules most existing houses out.
Which family fits
- Moving people between floors of a commercial building — passenger
- Beds, trolleys or wheeled clinical loads — passenger, specified as a bed lift
- Pallets, stock or equipment, driven or placed — freight
- Two to five floors of a private house — home lift
- A shaft that does not exist yet in a finished building — home lift, after a survey
The question that decides it
In every case the useful question is what the lift will carry, how often, and how that load arrives at the door. Capacity in kilograms is the answer to only the first of those, which is why a specification built from it alone tends to be wrong in an expensive direction.
Sources
Where this comes from
- Prawita Karya product range — Categories and Tenka model figures as published on this site.
FAQ
Common questions
Can a passenger lift be used to move goods?
Occasionally, but it wears the equipment in ways it was not specified for. Trolleys and heavy items concentrate load and damage door equipment and car finishes, which is why buildings with regular goods movement usually separate it onto a lift built for it.
What is the smallest lift that can go in a house?
In the Tenka range, Tsuki works within an 800 x 900 mm shaft with no pit and 2,800 mm of overhead. Whether that fits a particular house is a survey question — where a shaft can land, and what the floor below it can carry.