….As Of The Drafting Of This Update

We realize the recent outages have been a pain, but as previously reported Service Elevator 5 and Passenger Elevator 3 are both back in regular operation.

Our team with OTIS Elevator also reported that the planned cable maintenance on Passenger Elevator 4 was completed, actually a bit early than expected. They’ve tested and placed that car back into regular operation as well.

We know that waiting for the elevators, any time, can be a pain. Even when all of them are working perfectly, if they are busy you can sometimes wait several minutes. If there are scheduled moves or deliveries, or if there are major projects underway, you may wait even longer. Then, BOOM, one goes out of service, such as Elevator 3 did in late November.

Elevators are complicated pieces of machinery. If you do the actual math, there are miles of wiring and cable, and thousands upon thousands of buttons, relays, circuit boards and other parts and gizmos; and of course sensors and motors, safety devices and more, that make them do what they do.

Sometimes when there is an outage, it is a relatively quick fix. Our regular OTIS technician is here almost everyday doing something, just to keep up with the required care and maintenance. Often we will here over our internal radios that an elevator is stuck, and they are right on it and it is back operating minutes later. Many times, no one knowing that anything even happened.

As we’ve been reporting, many of these nuisance outages are typically caused by misuse, such as the door being physically held open by a hand, arm or leg. Also, passengers push the door open. That can cause safety’s to go off and break parts within the door and operator. We discourage holding any elevator doors. However, if you need to, do not physically hold them open. Use the door hold button on the inside panel.

Sometimes, outages are not simple. Such was the case as with Elevator #3 over the past month and a half. Our reps with OTIS gave us a summary of what occurred and why it took so long. To put it simply, as they did the work originally planned, they came across several additional issues that required time and resources to repair. On top of this, the timing with the holidays created more challenges.

At the beginning, they were originally delayed by a week because the team needed and scheduled to do this repair was delayed at another site. However, the single biggest problem causing the delay, was that once they determined everything that needed to be done, the motor had to be relocated it to their main Chicago machine shop to allow for ample workspace and to have access to tools and resources that would allow them to make the repair. Decommissioning the motor, detaching it from the cables and wiring and electronics alone took several days and once the motor was in their shop, and they could finally do the repairs needed, that added another two weeks to the process. Then it had to be returned to the building and reassembled. During the assembly process it was discovered a bearing had damage requiring a repair at their machine shop and that delayed the work for a few more days.

There is obviously more to it, but we wanted to explain and share some detail with you so everyone can understand why it took so much longer than originally intended. Most of the time, very simple things are all we need to address, but sometimes much more complicated things requiring more time and resources will be needed.

It has been 20 years since the last rehab of the machines. The next one is actually planned by the PTCA Reserve Study within about 10 years. So, much more extensive work will eventually be needed. As they get older, more little things may give us trouble, and more frequent larger and more complicated issues may occur from time to time, as we’ve seen with Elevator 3.

We appreciate everyone’s patience while this maintenance work was coordinated and accomplished.