In a recent stairlift installation we did, there were a few obstacles such as the stair lift had a door at the top of the stairs, and the bottom! This can be a problem for some stairlifts. For example, a Stannah stairlift would generally need a folding rail at the base in order to avoid the doorway. This presents more problems however and the doorway would be blocked, should there be a problem with the folding rail.
We found a better solution and in this scenario, we chose a Flow 2A stairlift due to its ability to navigate awkward stairs. This is the precursor to the Flow X stairlift, from Thyssen/AccessBDD. You can see in the pictures below, the drop nose rail cleverly avoids the doorway.
Stair Lift Door At Top Of Stairs & Basement Door
Of course at the base of the stairs, the stairlift itself would be blocking the doorway. But this is no problem because the stairlift can be parked anywhere on the rail and called with a remote control. Here’s the stairlift at the base of the stairs (in folded position) and in its park point.
To call the stairlift from its park point, you simply use the remote control which is placed at the base of the stairs:
Stair Lift Door At Top Of Stairs & Basement Door
This was also a narrow set of stairs with doorways at the top, too. So the Flow 2A stairlift was the perfect solution. Here you can see how narrow this staircase was. Some standard stairlifts would struggle to cope with this tight turn, for example. The Flow stairlift has a patented technology known as ASL (Advanced Swivel and Levelling). This allows it to deal with very tricky turns which would be prohibitive to some other stairlifts.
The Flow 2 or X stairlift is one of the most dexterous stairlifts when it comes to navigating awkward and difficult staircases such as this one. One of the features is that it can face the user downstairs to avoid their knees/toes clashing with the rail/wall. This is often the limitation on most stairlifts. The knee to wall measurement is often the most important one on many stairlifts. This measurement determines whether a stairlift can be fitted at all! Not so with the Flow! The Flow 2 and Flow X stairlifts allow a downward facing ride position and so gets around this obstacle.
Stair Lift Door At Top Of Stairs & Basement Door
This staircase also had an obstacle at the top of the stairs too! The doorway at the top was directly to the left of the stairs. Again, this leaves little room to park the stairlift. Also, the rail couldn’t protrude past the opening. Again, the Flow 2 stairlift rail is very forgiving and we custom made the rail to stop short of the doorway.
We used the same park point on the stairlift rail as for the bottom. A remote control at the top could be used to “call” the stairlift, as for the bottom.
Here’s a video showing the full stairlift setup once it was completed.
Visit our YouTube channel for more of our installation videos and checkout our other case study for a stairlift fitting on very narrow stairs.