ELEVATOR ENGINEERING IN NIGERIA: DAILY EXPERIENCES

Hello everyone, happy new week. Today I would be sharing something about elevators. I work as an elevator engineer here in Lagos Nigeria and I feel this kind of contents would worth sharing here.

Two days ago, I received an emergency call from my boss that one of the sites that is under our maintenance contract has tripped off. When I received the call, I began to think of different reasons why an elevator could trip off. There are alot of reasons why that could happen. It could come from

1. A damaged fuse from the elevator transformer
2. A faulty contractor
3. A faulty phase relay
4. A damaged drive
5. A safety trip off

There are alot more reasons why an elevator can trip off without outage in power supply to the lift. But these listed above are common especially to old lifts/elevator.

I journey over to the site with my partner who is also my brother, but on getting to see the position of the lift. We had the huge feeling it was a safety trip off.

When we arrived at the site location, the elevator was on the ground floor level and when we powered up the lift, there was no light on theIt was easily to notice that was the fault aa we have had faced a similar situation.

From the picture above, you would notice that there is no display on the screen of the board. That's because a safety switch has been tripped and since the lift was in ground floor, it will be safety trip in the shaft pit.

If you are wondering what a shaft is, it is the space that allows the lift travel to different floors of a building. While the pit is below the ground floor, which is the end point of the shaft below. It contains the buffer and the governor, this two components both has their switches.

Source

Above is a picture of an elevator buffer, the arrow points to the switch of the buffer.

Source

Above is a picture of a governor switch and above points to the switch of the governor.

With the images above, I believe you would be able to recognize them if you get to enter the pit of an elevator.

Back to our discussion, the lift was at the ground floor, so there was no way to enter the pit to adjust the switch. This is where we need to shunt the safety, to make the lift not sense the switch.

The image below is the shunting made.

It is quite impossible to know where to shunt without reading the circuit diagram of the lift but since it isn't our first time, we already know where to shunt. After making the shunt, the screen of the motherboard displayed immediately.

After succeeding shunting the Lift, the next task was to raise the lift to another floor where we can easily check the switch in the pit. So below is a picture I took when I went to the top of the lift to raise the lift via inspection mode.

The white box in the image above is called an inspection box. Please note that the picture is taken by me. The buttons on the box are called control buttons. After moving up the elevator, it was left to go into the pit to check which switch tripped.

To our surprise, I found that the pit was filled with water which made it quite difficult but anyway, since my brother was taller, he entered the pit like that then he figured the buffer switch was faulty which needs changing. So since we didn't have an extra switch at hand, we planned to change it another day but they must have removed the water in the pit when we are back. We left the safety shunted so they can be able make use of the elevator instead of leaving it idle.

Thanks for reading. More updates we be published when the buffer switch has been changed.

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All images in this post are mine except otherwise stated

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