How to tell a lift's been maintained by the lowest bidder
A logbook with no news in it, doors that argue with you, a pit nobody's looked in since the Olympics. The signs of race-to-the-bottom maintenance, and what good looks like.
There are two conversations about lift maintenance. The one in the sales meeting, where every contract covers everything and the response times are heroic. And the one in the motor room a year later, with a torch, where the machine tells you what’s actually been happening.
First, the fair bit: cheap does not automatically mean bad. Some small firms run lean, charge sensibly and do proper work. Some big-name contracts cost a fortune and deliver a signature. The price isn’t the tell. The evidence on the machine is the tell.
Engineers will recognise every sign below, usually from taking over a site. If you look after a building, this is the stuff to check before renewal, and none of it needs a single technical qualification. Just a torch and ten minutes.
The logbook with no news in it
A real maintenance history has scruff in it. Adjustments made, parts ordered, a rough February, a note arguing with the office about a door operator. What you’re hoping not to find is a year of identical entries: same tick boxes, same “checked, ok”, same twenty-minute window, one handwriting. Machines are not that boring. A logbook with no news in it is not a record of a healthy lift. It’s a record of visits.
Doors that argue
Doors cause more lift trouble than any other part of the machine, and they drift out of adjustment in normal service. That’s exactly why they’re the giveaway. On a looked-after lift, the doors close like they mean it. On a neglected one they hesitate, re-open on nothing, flinch at a shopping bag, or land with a bang that everyone in the building has learned to ignore. Nobody adjusted them, because adjustment takes time, and time is the thing the cheap visit doesn’t include.
Nothing has ever been replaced
Rollers, guides, contacts: the small consumable stuff wears in ordinary use, and its condition is the difference between maintenance and a wipe-down. If years of paperwork show no consumables, no lubrication schedule, no small parts, the visits have been inspections at best. The machine gets older on every one of them and nobody’s told the paperwork.
The pit tells the truth
You can stage a motor room for a client visit. Nobody stages the pit. Standing water, old oil, a decade of crisp packets, a sump pump that’s quietly dead: ten minutes down there with a torch tells you more about your contractor than the contract file does. If nobody’s been in the pit for years, plenty of other checks haven’t happened either.
The same fault keeps coming back
Pull the callout history and look for the shape of it. On a well-kept lift, breakdowns should be getting rarer, and a fault, once fixed, should stay fixed. The bad pattern is a repeat offender: the same entrapment on the same floor every few weeks, each visit resetting the clock and curing nothing. On the worst contracts, maintenance quietly becomes an inspection service. Everything wrong gets quoted as an extra. Nothing gets adjusted on the day. The cheap monthly price turns out to be the most expensive thing in the building.
Why it happens
Nobody sets out to maintain a lift badly. But when contracts are won on price alone, the sums stop working: if the visit price doesn’t cover an hour, the hour doesn’t happen, and the work that should have filled it comes back later as a quote. It’s a race to the bottom, the trade has been running it for years, and the machine always keeps the score.
If you look after a building
Four questions do most of the work at renewal time. How long is a routine visit, and what does it include? Can I see the logbook? What were my callout numbers over the last year? When were the doors last adjusted?
And one thing that isn’t a question: your lift’s thorough examination under LOLER is a legal requirement and it is not maintenance, however much the paperwork rhymes. The examination report tells you what condition the lift is really in, and it’s worth reading properly. We’ve written a plain-English guide to LOLER thorough examinations if you want the full picture.
Good maintenance is not mysterious. It looks like time on site, callout numbers that fall, paperwork with actual news in it, and an engineer who’ll talk to you straight. If you’re shopping for better, our directory of London lift firms is sorted by area and ranked neutrally. Nobody paid to be at the top of it.