Lift questions, answered independently

No. LML sells no lift equipment, holds no maintenance contracts and has no affiliation with any lift manufacturer. Our only commercial relationship on any project is with the building owner or their representative.

That is a structural fact about how the business is built, not a statement of intent. Because we hold no maintenance contracts, we cannot win work by recommending it. Because we sell no equipment, no recommendation we make results in a product sale to us. Our advice rests on one question only: what is best for the property and its equipment.

A lift company maintains, repairs, sells and installs the equipment. A lift consultant represents the building owner and independently assesses what is actually needed, case by case.

The distinction that matters commercially is who each party is paid by and what each party sells. A maintenance contractor's technical advice is genuinely expert, but it is naturally shaped by the products and services that contractor can supply, which may not be the only option available to the owner, or the best one. LML reviews the equipment and identifies every option before specifying a solution and tendering it to the market, so the most suitable and cost-effective outcome is the one that gets built.

Free advice is not always independent advice, and on lift assets the gap between the two is measured in tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. Getting the decision right the first time is what protects the budget, and we have many examples where independent guidance has done exactly that.

A contractor's proposal is not usually wrong. It is usually unverifiable. It does not tell you which items are genuinely at end of life and which have serviceable years remaining, whether the proposed scope is the right one for the property, whether the price is competitive, or what the alternatives are. An independent review answers those questions before the money moves, and typically costs a small fraction of the expenditure it examines.

No. LML holds no alignment, agency, distributorship or preferred-supplier arrangement with any lift manufacturer or maintenance contractor. Our role is to optimise the safety, performance, reliability and longevity of the equipment on the owner's behalf.

Our relationship with manufacturers runs both ways. Our audits routinely identify defects a manufacturer would rather were not found, and we also award major modernisation contracts worth millions of dollars on our clients' behalf. Independence matters most at specification and tendering, where a specification written around one manufacturer's proprietary solution eliminates competition before pricing begins. We write detailed, performance-based specifications that capture the options available, proprietary and non-proprietary, so that multiple contractors can price the same defined scope.

No. LML is remunerated only by the client who engages us. We accept no commission, referral fee, rebate or success fee from any contractor, manufacturer or supplier on any engagement.

Fees are agreed with the client in advance for a defined scope. Where we run a tender, our fee does not vary with which contractor wins or with the value of the awarded contract. In practice the fee is commonly offset by what the tender process delivers, and by identifying the right solution the first time.

Independence comes from having no financial interest in the outcome, not from having no contact with the industry. LML deals with every major contractor, and with a number of independent providers, and does so on the owner's behalf.

Where we recommend an LML performance-based maintenance agreement, written to protect the owner, that agreement is held between the owner and the lift contractor directly. We hold no maintenance contracts ourselves, so we do not compete with those companies and we do not depend on them for referrals. Our tender processes issue the same documents to every tenderer, record every question and answer as an addendum to the full list, and produce a written recommendation that assesses tenderers against a defined set of criteria rather than price alone, identifying where the recommended tender is not the lowest and why. That record is auditable by the client.

LML works across Australia, New Zealand and Papua New Guinea, and we continue to expand into new markets.

Our Australian work spans every state and territory, and we manage national portfolios. Our consultants are industry-trained specialists with more than 500 years of combined experience, supported by a dedicated project team of mechanical engineers and qualified professionals working solely on upgrade and replacement work alongside our senior consultants. We also hold Design Practitioner (DPVT) and Annual Fire Safety Statement (AFSS) accreditation. Because the obligations that attach to a lift differ between jurisdictions, reporting is always written to the requirements that apply where the asset actually sits.

Work is delivered in independently priced and independently invoiced stages, so you can commission one stage without committing to the programme. Fees are fixed for a defined scope and agreed in advance.

For an audit that means a defined fee for a defined number of assets. For a modernisation, the five stages are each priced separately: feasibility, technical specification, tender, contract draft and project management. We take no commission from any contractor on any engagement.

The building address, the number and type of lifts, your current maintenance agreement, any recent maintenance and breakdown records, any previous reports or quotations, and a description of the problem you are trying to resolve.

If some of that is unavailable, it is not an obstacle. Missing records are themselves a finding. An initial discussion will establish what is genuinely required for the scope in question.

Both. LML can be engaged for advice alone, or to act for the owner through the full delivery of a project: specification, tender, contract, construction monitoring, witness testing, defect close-out and handover.

Where we project manage, we represent the owner rather than the contractor. That includes a fortnightly site inspection cadence during works, a defect register carried forward between inspections, and confirmation that outstanding defects are closed and handover documentation received before the final stage is signed off.

Yes, if you want us to. Many clients engage LML specifically to take the technical conversation with the contractor off their desk.

That can range from reviewing and responding to quotations, through managing defect close-out and performance issues, to acting as the owner's representative for the duration of a project. Where an ongoing arrangement is in place, we hold the contractor to the measured performance obligations in the agreement rather than to a general expectation of service.

An independent assessment of the equipment, the maintenance arrangements and whatever prompted the concern. That establishes an evidence base before any money is committed.

It is deliberately the cheapest step in the sequence. Whether the answer turns out to be better maintenance, corrective works, a contract change, modernisation or replacement, the assessment is what tells you which, and what it should cost.

A lift condition audit is an independent physical inspection of a lift and its major components, producing a documented assessment of condition, compliance position and performance. It is worth separating it from a lifecycle or feasibility assessment, which is a different piece of work: the condition audit establishes how the equipment has been maintained and what state it is in now, while lifecycle and feasibility work looks ahead to remaining useful life, obsolescence position and replacement options. Obsolescence in particular is assessed at feasibility stage rather than as part of a maintenance and condition audit.

A full LML audit covers the machine, controller and drive, ropes or belts and their terminations, the car and its fixtures, doors and door operators (the single largest source of breakdowns on most installations), safety gear and speed governor, the lift shaft, pit and machine room, emergency communications, and a review of the maintenance and callout records. We also run a lift car ride quality analysis, which gives further insight into how the equipment is actually performing. Every finding is photographed and scored, every recommendation is costed and prioritised, and a defect list is issued to the incumbent maintenance provider to action.

For most commercial and residential buildings, a full independent condition audit once during the term of the maintenance agreement, typically every three to five years, is appropriate. Some of our national portfolio clients audit annually, and a shorter cycle is warranted where equipment is ageing, heavily used, or approaching a contract renewal or a major capital decision.

That cycle is separate from the routine maintenance and inspection your contractor performs, and it does not replace them. An independent audit is a different exercise with a different purpose: it measures the asset, not the servicing.

A maintenance contractor's inspection confirms the equipment is running and identifies work that contractor can carry out. An independent audit measures condition, compliance position, performance and remaining life against the applicable standards.

The two produce different documents for different purposes. A service report tells you what was done last visit. An audit tells you what condition the asset is in, what it will need over the next ten years, what that is likely to cost, and where the current maintenance is falling short of what is being paid for.

Yes, for part of it. Inspecting the car top, pit and safety gear requires the lift to be taken out of normal service for a period. Every LML consultant is a qualified lift technician, so we carry out that work ourselves rather than requiring your maintenance contractor to attend, which keeps a chargeable contractor visit off the cost of the audit. We do ask the contractor to attend in the smaller number of cases where uptime is critical or site rules require it, hospitals being the obvious example.

Site attendance is usually three to four hours per lift, varying with the rise of the building. In multi-lift buildings we sequence the work so that at least one car in each group stays in service, and we schedule outages outside peak periods where the building's use allows. In single-lift residential buildings we agree the window with the manager in advance and keep it as short as the inspection allows.

A written report containing photographed findings, a condition score for each asset, an assessment of remaining useful life, a review of the maintenance and callout records, a lift car ride quality analysis, and a prioritised action list with indicative costs and timing.

Reports open with an executive summary, so they can be read by the people who have to act on them (committees, managers and boards), not only by engineers. The action list separates items requiring immediate attention from those that can be planned and budgeted, which is what allows a committee to stage expenditure rather than face it all at once. The defect list is issued separately to the incumbent maintenance provider.

Yes, and it is one of the most common reasons LML is engaged. An independent assessment establishes whether proposed works are technically necessary, whether the scope is appropriate, and whether the price is competitive.

The outcome is not always a reduction in scope. Audits sometimes confirm the contractor's position, and sometimes identify items the proposal missed. What changes is that the owner is making the decision on independent evidence rather than on the recommendation of the party being paid to carry out the work.

A defensible agreement defines scope and exclusions explicitly, sets separate response times for breakdowns and entrapments, specifies preventative maintenance frequency and the tasks in each visit, names which components are covered and which are charged as extras, and states how performance is measured and what happens when it is not met.

Most disputes we review are not about whether work was done but about whether the contract required it. Vague scope, silent exclusions, uncapped escalation and automatic roll-over provisions are common and are almost always resolvable at renewal, but only if they are identified before the agreement is signed.

The labels are not standardised between contractors, so they tell you very little on their own. What matters is the exclusion list.

Broadly, a basic or preventative agreement covers scheduled servicing and lubrication, with repairs and components charged separately. A comprehensive agreement adds a defined set of repairs and replacement components. A full comprehensive agreement extends that further, sometimes to major components. Two contracts carrying the same label from different contractors can allocate risk entirely differently. Always read the exclusions and the definitions before the inclusions.

Monthly to quarterly preventative maintenance is the Australian norm for lifts in commercial and residential buildings, with the interval set by equipment type, age, usage and the manufacturer's recommendations.

In practice a quarterly cycle is common in apartment buildings and monthly attendance is common in higher-traffic commercial installations. What matters more than the stated frequency is whether attendance actually occurs and what is performed during it. Both are auditable against the agreement you are already paying for.

Measure five things: attendance against the scheduled preventative maintenance program, callback frequency and repeat faults on the same unit, response times against the times in your contract, defect close-out rates, and the proportion of attendances that are reactive rather than scheduled.

Each is verifiable from records the contractor already produces. Where those records are not being supplied, or cannot be reconciled to the contract, that is itself a finding. Records only take you so far, though. Some of the defects that matter most never present as a fault: ropes that are not being lubricated, for example, will corrode and rouge quietly for years, and the problem surfaces on physical inspection long before it would ever be visible to a building owner, by which point the remedy is replacement rather than maintenance. Measuring the paperwork and inspecting the equipment belong together. LML measures these on a consistent basis so performance can be compared across time and, for portfolio clients, across buildings and contractors.

Almost always, yes, but the terms of your existing agreement determine when and at what cost, so check three clauses before giving notice: the term and expiry date, the notice period, and any automatic roll-over provision.

Automatic roll-over clauses are common and are the usual reason owners find themselves locked in for a further term. Notice periods can be lengthy. Some agreements also contain early-termination charges or provisions dealing with proprietary tools, software or access codes on the controller. That last point is worth checking early, because it affects who can realistically maintain the equipment after a change.

Proprietary and closed-protocol are not the same thing, and the difference matters. The major manufacturers supply only their own proprietary equipment, but most of that equipment can still be serviced by other contractors, including Tier 2 firms. The usual constraints are sourcing spare parts, which have to come from the manufacturer, and equipment-specific expertise, rather than an outright technical lock-out. Genuine lock-out does exist, though: where controllers, diagnostic tools or access codes are restricted to a single authorised supplier, it becomes impractical for anyone else to maintain or fault-find on the equipment, and competition at each renewal is materially reduced.

This is one of the most significant long-term commercial consequences of a modernisation decision, and it is generally settled at specification stage rather than at contract stage. Where an owner wants a contestable maintenance market for the next twenty years, the requirement for non-proprietary or open-protocol equipment must be written into the specification before tendering, not raised afterwards. What we care about is the optimisation of vertical transportation: improving the safety, reliability, performance and longevity of the equipment.

Define the scope first, then price it. A tender that asks contractors to quote against their own standard agreements produces submissions that cannot be compared.

LML's process establishes the required scope, service levels and reporting obligations in a single specification, issues it to a recorded tenderer list, manages questions and issues addenda to the full list so no tenderer holds a different document set, and produces a written assessment and recommendation. Where the recommended tender is not the lowest, the assessment says so and explains why.

As a working benchmark, a well-maintained lift in a commercial or residential building would be expected to record in the order of 0.5 to 2 breakdowns per lift per year. Service and industrial lifts typically run higher. Where a unit is recording substantially more than that, the cause is usually identifiable and often correctable.

These figures are industry rules of thumb rather than published Australian statistics, and they should be read with care. Callback rates are affected by usage, age, environment and how the contractor records events: some log every reset, others do not. The useful signal is not the raw number but the trend, and whether the same fault recurs on the same unit.

On most installations the largest single source of breakdowns is the doors and door operator, followed by control system faults and worn components approaching end of life.

Recurring faults are diagnostic. A unit that fails repeatedly in the same way is usually telling you either that a component is at end of life and is being repeatedly reset rather than replaced, or that a maintenance task is not being performed. Reviewing the fault history alongside the maintenance records and a physical inspection will normally identify which.

Industry estimates put entrapments at roughly one in five lift breakdowns. Entrapment frequency is therefore a direct function of overall reliability.

This is the metric most likely to generate complaints from residents and tenants, and the one committees are most often asked about. It is also the strongest practical argument for treating a rising callback rate as urgent rather than routine.

Whatever time you are prepared to have a resident wait, because the response time in your maintenance agreement is what actually governs how quickly someone is released. Entrapment response should be specified separately from general breakdown response, and most agreements we review do not separate them.

If your agreement sets a single response time covering everything from a stopped lift to a person trapped in a car, you have no distinct entrapment commitment to enforce. The fix is straightforward and is best made at renewal: a separate entrapment response time, a defined measurement point, and a stated consequence when it is not met.

Escalate it from a service issue to a technical one. Persistent faults that survive multiple attendances usually need root-cause analysis rather than another repair.

That means reviewing the full fault history rather than the last few callouts, inspecting the equipment independently, examining what was actually replaced on previous attendances, and determining whether the fault is a component at end of life, a maintenance deficiency, or a design or installation issue that was never resolved. The outcome is a corrective action plan the contractor can be held to, with defined items and dates.

Age alone is not the trigger. The usual indicators are parts obsolescence, rising callback frequency, deteriorating ride quality or door performance, control system failures, and repair costs that no longer make sense against remaining life.

The decision is a lifecycle comparison, not a judgement about how old the equipment is. A twenty-five year old lift with available parts and a good maintenance history may have years of serviceable life. A fifteen year old lift with an obsolete controller and no parts supply may not.

Typical service life before major modernisation is in the range of fifteen to twenty-five years, though controllers and drives commonly reach obsolescence well before the mechanical equipment does. Newer is not automatically longer-lived: the compact machine-room-less units now common in residential buildings are less likely to reach twenty years than the heavier equipment they replaced.

How long any individual lift lasts depends on usage, environment, maintenance quality and whether earlier partial upgrades have been carried out. The more useful question for budgeting is not how long the lift will last but which components will reach obsolescence first, and when. That is what a condition audit establishes.

Obsolescence is the point at which the manufacturer no longer produces or supports a component, and it usually arrives first in the control system rather than the mechanical equipment.

Components are typically manufactured for something in the order of ten to fifteen years from the original release of the equipment, after which supply depends on remaining stock, reconditioned parts or third-party equivalents. The practical risk is not cost but time: an obsolete component that fails can leave a lift out of service for months. Establishing the obsolescence position of your controller and drive is one of the more valuable outputs of a condition audit, because it converts an unpredictable risk into a datable one.

Partial modernisation is common, and depending on the condition of the existing equipment and the building it can be the right answer. The structure, guide rails, shaft and sometimes the machine can frequently be retained while the control system, drive, door operator and fixtures are replaced. The constraint runs in both directions: existing site conditions can also mean a full replacement is not feasible, even where it would otherwise be preferred.

What can be retained is determined by condition, compatibility and the compliance position the completed works must meet. A staged approach also lets a committee spread expenditure across budget cycles, provided the staging is planned as a single strategy rather than assembled from successive reactive repairs.

It depends on the extent of the works, and it is one of the more commonly misunderstood areas of lift compliance. Our rule of thumb is to aim for full compliance wherever it is practicable. The code does not force an untouched part of an older lift up to current requirements during a partial upgrade, but it does actively encourage an equivalent level of safety to a new lift wherever that is physically and economically achievable. On any partial upgrade we recommend including the safety and code-compliance items as a minimum.

Where you are altering or replacing specific parts only (door equipment or fixtures, say), it is the newly installed equipment that must meet current standards; the retained components are generally only required to meet the standard that applied when they were originally installed. New lifts are designed and built to AS 1735.1.2, an identical adoption of the European standard EN 81-20:2020, with testing to AS 1735.1.3 (EN 81-50:2020). Significant alterations to an existing installation can trigger requirements that a like-for-like repair would not. The position that applies should be established for the specific installation and the specific proposed works, before the scope is fixed. That is exactly what we do at feasibility stage.

Through five independently priced and independently invoiced stages: feasibility, technical specification, tender, contract draft, and project management through to handover.

Each stage can be engaged separately, so an owner can commission a feasibility assessment without committing to the whole programme. Project management includes a fortnightly site inspection cadence, a recorded defect register carried forward between inspections, witness testing, and confirmation that outstanding defects are closed and handover documentation received before the final stage is signed off.

The principal series is AS 1735, "Lifts, escalators and moving walks". New passenger and goods passenger lifts are built to AS 1735.1.2, an identical adoption of EN 81-20:2020, with component design, calculation, examination and testing under AS 1735.1.3 (EN 81-50:2020).

Other parts commonly relevant: AS 1735.11 for fire-rated landing doors; AS 1735.12 for accessibility features; AS 1735.19 for lift emergency communications; and AS 1735.5.1 and AS 1735.5.2 for escalators and moving walks, the latter dealing specifically with improving the safety of existing units. Alongside the standards sit the National Construction Code, the Disability (Access to Premises — Buildings) Standards, and workplace safety legislation. Which of them bites on any given building is a question worth establishing before works are scoped rather than after.

Not with the series as a whole. The NCC deals with lifts in Volume One, Part E3 "Lift installations", supported by Specification 24, and it calls up only a small number of AS 1735 parts directly.

This surprises people, and it is a common source of error in specifications. Much of the building-related content of the AS 1735 series was consolidated into the Code itself and expressed as performance requirements. The EN-based parts that new lifts are actually built to apply through plant design registration and through contract specification rather than through the NCC. It is one of the reasons a specification written by someone who has not read both documents can end up requiring the wrong thing.

Where a lift serves an accessible building, the Disability (Access to Premises — Buildings) Standards set minimum car dimensions that vary with travel distance, together with requirements for handrails, control buttons, automatic audible announcement of levels, and hands-free emergency communication.

One recent change is worth knowing about. Under the 2025 edition of the National Construction Code, adopted from May 2025 with timing varying by jurisdiction, low-speed automatic lifts built to AS 1735.16 are no longer permitted, and accessibility and home lifts must use constant-pressure controls. Beyond that, the requirements that apply depend on the building, the lift type and the travel. This is also an area where the referenced editions of the underlying standards and the versions currently published do not always align, so the position is worth confirming for the specific installation before works are specified.

A stretcher facility is a lift car sized to carry an ambulance stretcher, required by the National Construction Code in certain buildings, with minimum internal car and door dimensions set by the Code.

Whether a stretcher facility is required depends on the building's classification and rise. It is a matter to establish at design stage on new buildings, because retrofitting stretcher capability into an existing shaft is rarely feasible.

Very likely yes. Lift emergency phones that rely on the copper telephone network or older mobile networks are being progressively cut off as those networks are decommissioned, and a lift emergency phone that cannot connect is a live safety problem.

The relevant standard requires the emergency call to reach a person or a permanently staffed monitoring centre at all times, with battery backup and documented monthly test calls. Buildings that have not migrated their lift phones to a current network should treat this as urgent rather than scheduled work, and should confirm that the monthly test call regime is actually being performed and recorded.

Yes, and it is a substantial part of our work. Owners corporations, strata committees and their managers engage LML directly, usually when a committee needs independent evidence to support a decision.

The most common triggers are a maintenance agreement approaching renewal, a modernisation proposal from the incumbent contractor, breakdowns affecting residents, a levy or special resolution that has to be justified to owners, and a new manager taking over a building with no reliable lift history.

Enough to meet the modernisation cost at the point the equipment reaches end of life. The number therefore depends entirely on the condition and remaining life of your specific installation, not on a rule of thumb.

The practical approach is to establish remaining useful life and likely scope through a condition audit, obtain an indicative cost for that scope, and work backwards to an annual contribution across the remaining years. Doing this early converts an unpredictable special levy into a planned contribution, which is materially easier to carry at a general meeting.

It moves the discussion from opinion to evidence. A committee cannot resolve a technical disagreement by debate, but it can resolve it by reference to an independent assessment that both sides accept the basis of.

Our reports are written for that purpose: condition scored on a consistent basis, findings photographed, options set out with indicative costs and timing, and a recommendation that can be tabled, minuted and defended to owners. That record also protects the committee if the decision is later questioned.

Usually, yes. Separating immediate requirements from medium and longer-term works allows expenditure to be spread across budget cycles rather than raised as a single special levy.

The condition assessment is what makes staging defensible: it identifies which items genuinely cannot wait, which can be deferred and for how long, and what the consequence of deferral is. Staging assembled from successive reactive repairs generally costs more overall than staging planned as a single strategy.

Yes. Portfolio work is a distinct service line, and the value of it is consistency: every asset assessed against the same criteria, scored on the same scale, and reported in the same format regardless of which contractor maintains it or where it sits.

Without that consistency, a portfolio owner receives reports written by different contractors to different standards and has no reliable basis for comparing buildings, ranking risk or sequencing capital. With it, the portfolio can be managed as a portfolio.

By measuring the same things everywhere: condition score, callback frequency per unit, response times against contract, defect close-out, maintenance cost per lift, and remaining useful life.

Once those are held consistently, the comparisons that matter become available: which buildings are underperforming, which contractors are underperforming, where maintenance spend is out of line with equipment condition, and which sites should be prioritised for capital. LML Portfolio Logic™ exists to rank and sequence works on that basis, so budget removes the most risk first.

By establishing condition, criticality, obsolescence position and remaining useful life for each asset, then sequencing works so that expenditure is smoothed across years and the highest-risk assets are addressed first.

The output is a multi-year plan rather than a list. It identifies what must be done and when, what can be deferred and at what risk, and what the consequence of deferral is. That is the information a board or committee needs to approve a budget rather than react to a failure.

Yes. Lift equipment is frequently one of the largest undisclosed capital liabilities in a commercial or residential acquisition, and its condition is not apparent from a walk-through or from the fact that it is running.

Technical due diligence identifies equipment age and condition, the obsolescence position of the control system, maintenance history and contractor arrangements, known and outstanding defects, and anticipated capital expenditure over the holding period. A controller approaching obsolescence can represent a six-figure liability that does not appear anywhere in the vendor's disclosure.

A physical condition assessment of each unit, a review of maintenance records and contractor arrangements, the obsolescence position of major components, outstanding defects, and a forecast of capital expenditure over the intended holding period.

The deliverable is written to transaction timeframes and is structured so that identified liabilities can be quantified and, where appropriate, taken into negotiation.

At concept or early design stage. Decisions about lift numbers, capacities, speeds, grouping, core configuration and shaft dimensions become progressively more expensive to change and eventually impossible to change at all.

The most costly vertical transportation errors are not equipment failures but planning failures: a core that cannot accommodate the traffic the building will generate, shafts sized to a specification that later changes, or a lift group configured for a use the building no longer has. None of these are correctable once the structure is built.

Traffic analysis models the expected movement of people through a building to determine whether a proposed lift arrangement will deliver acceptable handling capacity and waiting times. It is the calculation that determines how many lifts a building needs, and at what capacity and speed.

Inputs include building use, population, number of floors, travel height and expected peak traffic patterns. Simulation then allows alternative configurations to be compared before the core is committed. Where this analysis is performed by a manufacturer, the resulting specification tends to reflect that manufacturer's product range. That is why we recommend it be done independently and expressed as performance requirements rather than as equipment selections.