You should know how to operate this vertically moving coffin
@MatthewMinnie, @Jon5432, @BRailFan, @mateo_luis & all. Title : Epic win or epic fail ? Rare 2004 OTIS 2000 E bottom drive traction lift… Location : Undisclosed flats, Rochester UK. BENO Lift Tour POV : And now we go to some random posh and modern flats in Rochester aka where all of the rich idiots who owns Medway Council live. They have pretty much full control of the council in question. They can do whatever they want while this very nasty council happily screw over everyone else. Indeed, in the entire Medway Council, Rochester is the only place that is nice. Everywhere else, it’s chavy and everything is run down. The people who owns the council are the worst kind of egoistic bad person ! But I sneaked in their flats which are in a really good shape and good quality for modern day flats. They started to build them in 2003 and finished them in 2004 (The lift is from 2004). Since these are very posh flats, you would expect a very good lift like an OTIS 2000 VF or a 3rd Generation EcoDisc. But nope, the lift is actually an OTIS 2000 E. It’s got the posh OTIS 2000 buttons but it has old-fashioned 2-speed levelling (No variable frequency drive, but 1 contactor for the full speed and 1 contactor for the slow levelling speed). These lifts are really really rare in the UK but a lot more common in Spain. Although a 2000 VF would have been much better and the rich people could easily afford it ! But the worst thing isn’t that ! This lift has already been modded in 2018 because it is quite violent when it slows down (Old style 2-speed) ! And since there’s a lot of old people there, they complained and in 2018, Robertson Lifts replaced the indicator, replaced the controller with a Siemens PLC logic and added a generic VF drive. On the down side, the original voice is gone, which means no more « Please select your floor » message, the lift is less characterful and there’s no more pre-doors. Turns out, the VF is fully controlled by an intelligent board which is connected to a shaft encoder and the PLC logic itself. Robertson did a great job at setting it up. This lift travels the very last 0.1 meters at 0.1 m/s and has very fast accelerations and decelerations which are completely controlled by the intelligent circuit board to ensure that this lift goes to the correct position. The lift’s full speed hasn’t been changed and it’s still 1 m/s. There is no pre-doors though, which is quite annoying. This mod is not the worst thing about this lift ! The worst thing is what happened to this lift quite recently ! 4 months ago, the shaft encoder had a problem and that lift was broken because of that, Classic Lifts have the lift maintenance contract since January 2023 (The lift was maintained by OTIS between 2004 and 2018, then by Robertson from 2018 to January 2023). The interface of the intelligent board is a LCD screen and some buttons for the menus. It has main 2 menus : Settings and Faults. The dumb engineers picked the wrong menu and set the levelling speed to 0.01 m/s. Then they realized that this lift is still out of order and then, they picked the correct menu and they discovered what the fault actually was. They entered the lift shaft and discovered that there was too much dust on the encoder so it was not able to read. They cleaned it up which solved the problem and the lift works again. But before the engineer’s visit, the levelling speed was 0.1 m/s and the lift took 1 second to level. But now, it’s 0.01 m/s, which is 10 times slower than the previous speed, so the levelling is 10 times longer, which means that the lift now takes 10 freaking seconds to do a damn levelling ! What a brilliant maintenance operation this was ! The accelerations and decelerations are still the same though… Also, since I the 2018 mod, the floor buttons beeps when you press them and it has a weird custom TTS voice (Formerly OTIS 2000 voice). The lift motor is a bottom-drive OTIS 2000 and it’s still original and makes epic sounds ! But the generic VF, beep, voice and indicator mod is quite and what Classic Lifts did to the levelling was appallingly bad ! So, this is pretty much an epic fail ! Also, there is a sticker saying « Robertson Lifts mod 2018 » on the lift. Also, there’s a black plastic box with a sticker saying « Lift maintenance contractor: » and below the sticker there’s the space where the owner puts the maintenance company’s card and as you can see, Classic Lifts is doing the maintenance !
