Lift Woes

 Our lift has been well used of recent times, especially since my broken neck / stairs reluctance.   We have kept it regularly serviced but it has never been 100% right since new.  Specifically it was temperamental when it came to re-setting it after maintenance.  A niggle but something was clearly wrong.  After a recent service the man from Foulds Lifts simply could not make the panel accept the codes to re-set it.  He rang the original suppliers Evo Lifts.  He even rang Aritco, the Swedish manufacturers all to no avail.  He was doing the right things but the lift just would not play ball.  Eventually, and for no reason, it accepted the codes at the umpteenth attempt.  The lift then worked perfectly.

But an intermittent fault could be dangerous so we decided to get it properly tested, diagnosed and sorted.

Foulds' engineer traced that problem to circuitry right at the top of the lift shaft - the blandly named U5 box which is the lift's main brain box.  Good to know what needed replacing.  Bad news was the cost!  U5 box £1,200 plus VAT. Happily we qualify for zero VAT for lift and such because of our decrepitude.  This is what the old U5 box looks like:

Tiny thing and light as a feather.  Solid gold would be cheaper.  Evo kindly got it for us at trade rates but we had to pay £140 import duty (thanks a bunch Boris).  There will be another £1,000 or two for diagnosis and fitting.  A £3,000 -ish repair!  Anyway the replacement is fitted and we have our lift back in action.

An interesting visit yesterday from Settle man Mike Howarth who dropped off a copy of Model Railways from 1967 which featured our water tower, below top picture:

We have very few old pictures of the tower but this one shows the top of the hairy scary ladder and the railings which surrounded the bridge across the tank.  It also shows the water level indictor to the left of the ladder.  Just visible is the white diamond shape at the bottom of its travel, indicating a full tank.  Elsewhere in the magazine is a feature about the Garsdale water tower, identical to ours and demolished in 1971.  The author had done drawings of Garsdale but he had to rely on the Settle tower for what the entrance doors had looked like:

Another visitor yesterday was Carl Johnson, boss man of builder Johnson Ltd who did the original building work back in 2010/11.  Carl had not been back since but was fascinated to see how the place was faring.  He was mightily impressed with the new rear extension and its energy efficiency.  He was though concerned about rainwater ingress between the cast iron tank and the tops of the main supporting walls in places.  We agreed that remedial work would be a summer job and he was confident that the problem could be dealt with.  Not only that his firm now has an enormous JCB hoist that can  reach the top of the tower to make for easy access to do the job properly and in safety.