What is lifting equipment?
Lifting equipment in a building includes passenger and goods lifts, hoists, cradles, gantries and the accessories used with them. All are subject to thorough examination by a competent person.
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<img src="https://facilityoptix.co.uk/glossary/lifting-equipment/diagram.svg" alt="lifting equipment — diagram from FacilityOptix" width="880" height="620" loading="lazy">
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<a href="https://facilityoptix.co.uk/glossary/lifting-equipment">What is lifting equipment?</a> — diagram by
<a href="https://facilityoptix.co.uk">FacilityOptix</a>
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</figure>Thorough examination is an independent assessment rather than a service, and a maintenance visit by the lift contractor does not satisfy it. Both are needed and they are usually bought from different parties.
Accessories — slings, chains, eyebolts — are frequently missed because they are not fixed installations and do not appear on an asset register built by walking plant rooms.
Reports carry defects with timescales, and an immediate defect takes equipment out of use. A report filed without the defect section being read is the standard failure.
In practice
A goods hoist nobody thinks of as lifting equipment.
It is maintained by the lift contractor as part of a package and examined on a cycle the building inherited.
What counts as lifting equipment is broader than lifts, and the items that get missed are the ones that do not look like the category — gantries, hoists, tail lifts, vehicle ramps.
The examination regime is set by a competent person against the equipment and its use.
What goes wrong in practice
- Thorough examination assumed to be part of the maintenance contract.
- Accessories absent from the register entirely.
- Defect sections of reports never extracted into the action list.