Home Elevators & Lifts in Reno, NV

Less floor area than most people expect and more vertical room. A common two-passenger cab sits in a shaft of roughly five feet by four, which is about the footprint of a stacked pair of closets. The harder requirements are a pit of eight to twelve inches below the lowest landing and genuine clearance above the top one — and in a two-storey house that top landing is often under a sloped roof, which is what actually rules machines out.

A two-stop residential elevator typically lands in the mid five figures installed, before your builder's work on the pit and hoistway, which is a separate and sometimes substantial line. Vacuum elevators and through-floor lifts often come in lower because they need far less construction. Platform lifts are lower again. We give you rough numbers for every option your house allows at the end of the survey rather than one number for the machine we would prefer to sell.

It is a self-contained tube that moves the cab by changing air pressure, so it needs no pit, no machine room and very little building work. For retrofits where there is nowhere to put a shaft, it is often the only realistic option, and it looks striking. The trade-offs are real: smaller cab, lower weight capacity, generally no wheelchair use in the smaller models, and a distinctly audible pump. We would rather you hear those from us than discover them later.

Often, yes — and we do not sell them, so we have no reason to say otherwise. If the problem is one flight of stairs, the user can transfer on and off a seat, and nobody needs to move a wheelchair between floors, a stairlift solves it for a small fraction of the money and a fraction of the disruption. We will tell you when that is the honest answer and point you at somebody who fits them.

Yes, and which one depends on the machine. A residential elevator and a vertical platform lift fall under different standards, with different inspection requirements. Northern Nevada also sits in a seismic design category that adds bracing and retention requirements. We handle the application and put the seismic work in the original quote rather than raising it as a change order later.

The machine itself is usually three to five days on site. The timeline that matters is the building work before it: forming the pit, framing the hoistway and running power typically takes your builder one to three weeks, and lead times on the equipment itself commonly run eight to sixteen weeks. We give you the equipment lead time at the quote so the sequence can be planned around it.

On elevators with a swinging landing door and a folding car gate there is a space between the two. On older residential installations that space can be several inches, deep enough for a small child to be in it when the outer door closes and the car moves. It is a known and documented hazard, and the standard has since been changed. If your home has an elevator installed before roughly the last decade, it is worth having the gap measured — the fix is space guards and sometimes a gate monitor, and it is about half a day of work.

Annually at minimum, and most residential elevators in the country do not get it. The parts that wear are the ones you cannot see: door interlocks, safety gear, cables and controller relays. We book the next visit before leaving the current one, because a service interval that depends on a homeowner remembering is not really an interval.

Every machine we install has a way down without power — usually a battery lowering system that brings the cab to the nearest landing and opens the doors, plus a battery-backed light and telephone or intercom in the car. We test all three at commissioning and again at each annual service, and we walk you through using them before we hand over.