Elevator technician: standards, inspection and safety on vertical transport.

An earlier article provided an overview of the automation and process education's specializations including elevator technician. Here we go one level deeper: which standards and rules actually make an elevator safe and what distinguishes work with vertical transport from the rest of the automation trade?

§DS/EN 81 — the standard behind the lift

Safety requirements for elevators in Europe are contained in the standard family DS/EN 81. DS/EN 81-20 establishes the basic safety requirements for design and installation — including requirements for doors cabin control emergency stop and alarm functions. DS/EN 81-50 supplements with requirements for calculation design and testing of selected components such as cables and springs. The standards replaced the earlier DS/EN 81-1 and 81-2 from 1998 and all elevators put into service after August 31 2017 must meet the requirements of the new standards.

• 01DS/EN 81-20 — safety requirements for lift design and installation as a whole
• 02DS/EN 81-50 — requirements for calculation, design and testing of selected components
• 03Applies to elevators placed in service after 31 August 2017

§BR18 and rescue rooms

Beyond the European standards, the Danish building regulations, BR18, set requirements for elevators in buildings — including in the regulations for elevators in the section on technical installations. A specific Danish element is the requirement for a rescue room: a safe room where people can stay if an elevator breaks down between floors and from which they can be rescued safely. The Danish Safety Authority oversees the elevator field in Denmark and publishes guidance on, among other things, rescue rooms and pre-approval.

§Why are the requirements so strict?

An elevator differs from most other automatic systems in that ordinary people — often without any technical background — are physically present in the moving part of the machine. This places extra high demands on redundancy in safety functions: brakes that can stop the cabin even if cables break door contacts that prevent movement with open doors and emergency communication that always works even if power fails. Failures here cannot just affect a production line — they affect the person in the elevator.

§Escalators and moving walkways

The specialty covers not just elevators, but also escalators and moving walkways – continuously running transport systems where people step on and off in motion. Safety here is among other things about pinch protection at landing edges, emergency stop along the entire course, and monitoring of speed and chain tension so the system stops if anything deviates from expected.

“On most systems, it's the machine that is in danger if something goes wrong. On an elevator, it's the person inside.”