A talk with a fire inspector about elevator recall testing made me double-check our logs

I ran into a fire inspector named Carl at a job site in Springfield last Tuesday. We were chatting about the annual tests, and he offhandedly said, 'You know, I see a lot of guys just check for the car to move to the recall floor. They don't always verify the lobby signals and the door re-open function actually cut out.' That hit different because I've been guilty of that exact shortcut on a busy day. It's easy to see the car go to the lobby and call it good. But if the visual signal in the hall doesn't light up or the doors don't stay locked, it's not a full test. That could mean big trouble during a real fire. Now I'm going back through my last six months of test sheets to make sure I noted every step. Has anyone else had an inspector point out a common step we might be missing?

3 comments

3 Comments

sethm582d ago

Heard the same thing about forgetting to check the shunt trip.

the_leo2d ago

What trips the shunt, a power surge?

alex8202d ago

My buddy at the old plant saw a whole line go down for three hours last spring. They traced it back to a failed shunt trip breaker nobody had tested in the maintenance cycle. It was one of those things everyone just assumed was fine. Exactly like what sethm58 said, someone just forgot to put it on the check sheet. The real kicker was finding out it had been sitting there dead for probably two years. They had to rewrite their whole testing plan because of that one miss.