The beds’ features include steering wheels or smart fifth wheels and Hill-Rom’s IntelliDrive motorised system – they are classed as lifting equipment so maintenance must comply with lifting regulations such as LOLER.
Part of the statutory periodic thorough examination involves testing the safe working load, which calls for the use of test weights that exceed this load.
Van racking and conversion business Bott was appointed as the conversion partner for the Hill-Rom fleet. Having worked together on lifting equipment projects for many years, Bott and Penny Hydraulics worked with HillRom to develop a bespoke hydraulically powered lift, to lift and lower the test weights on to engineers’ vans for their hospital bed test visits.
Martin Oke, Penny Hydraulics’ sales manager, explains the challenge: “The lift needed to be high capacity, to easily lift and lower test weights up to 400kg in weight in and out of the van. In addition, the van spec was a Ford Transit Custom with a low roof height…squeezing a high-capacity lift into this relatively small space is not easy.”
Penny’s engineers worked with Bott and Hill-Rom to design a lift, before manufacturing the prototype. “Our engineers made lots of micro-adjustments to what was a standard brochure product, to come to the final Hill-Rom specification lift,” says Oke.
“We took the best features from a standard Penny LoadLift and tweaked it to suit the specific van and goods to be lifted. This therefore offered both a cost-effective and a tried and tested solution for Hill-Rom.”
The LL250 LoadLift is a hydraulically powered, lightweight lifting platform for loading vans via the rear or side cargo doors, and Hill-Rom’s LoadLift was supplied to run off the vehicle battery in 12V.
Eleven lifts have already been dispatched for installation at Bott as part of full vehicle conversions, and more lifts will be delivered in the first half of this year.