I love that seemingly random trades that we largely take for granted have these case studies that result in awards for things us muggles never think about.
A garage I went to subscribed to a trade magazine for towing and recovery companies and left the issues in the waiting room. Sure enough, they had a recovery of the year type of award.
I suspect awards are one of the more profitable niches of the wider events industry.
They're cheaper to produce than a full-scale conference (needing just a 1 day hire of a hotel ballroom or similar) and are easy to sell - every business or team nominated for an award will pay for a table, as will various suppliers and vendors who see it as a great marketing opportunity.
you know an award is actually legit when someone from a trade body contacts you the week before sounding slightly put out that nobody from your member company is flying to Europe to attend their event even though you did fill out an application form, you assume their event must be a bit short of attendees but reluctantly dip into the small startup budget for a single person to fly out there because "something something networking", and then your colleague gets surprised by actually winning it whilst surrounded by the teams everyone else sent.
on the other hand, I found it hilarious one of my father's old companies publicly sponsored a special new category of award at a legit-seeming construction event. You'll never guess who won...
I was at one committee meeting when the annual award ceremony came up. One person was considered for an award because she had a big family with many cousins and nieces. All the better to sell tables.
It makes me feel uninformed about the world, but in a good way. It leaves me mildly awestruck when I learn about some new invisible corner of our society that has so much more depth than I realized. I appreciate elevators more (both from a safety perspective and as a convenience) knowing there are people who care so much about them.
I feel like that sounds less weird when you really start to think about it. There is lot of chicken being processed. And the margins must not be great and competition between suppliers must be at least somewhat fierce...
So there are good use cases for capital if you are in that market.
I don't know if it's still running but the hand-operated elevator in Chicago's Fine Arts building on Sth Michigan Ave deserves an award. I always enjoyed having an excuse to visit the music rooms on the top floors. The first time I visited I was worried but seeing the skill of the operator was something else.
I wish there was more explanation as to why the original builders decided to make a cat's cradle out of the roping. It's not like you can accidentally run the cables for cab #1 all the way over cabs 2 & 3 because you weren't paying attention during installation.
Because, in the original installation, the elevator machines were at the bottom. That's rare today, but in 1907, getting the heavy machinery up to the top of the building was much harder. Some old elevators have a winding drum at the bottom, and this was apparently one of them. So there was too much wire rope and pulleys involved.
Getting the new machinery up to the top was a miserable job. The article hints at this. "The Metropolis Trust Building is located on one of the busiest corners in San Francisco; so there was no chance to use cranes. And the building itself offered limited access; there was no loading dock or service entrance. All equipment had to enter through the front door – including 20’ pieces of reinforcing steel and 4,000 lb gearless hoist machines." They had to remove two elevators and cabs to get an empty hoistway so they could lift all that stuff. They had to get lifting equipment up to the top. They had an existing elevator to help, but they still had to move stuff from the top elevator stop to the top machine room above, somehow. This brings up images of a lot of big guys, chain falls, small electric hoists carried into position by hand to move larger electric hoists, and lots of temporary steel beams and timber baulks. This was probably night work, because all this blocked the building entrance and lobby. They got a 20 foot steel beam in the front door, into an elevator shaft, hauled it up to the top, got it out, raised it one more floor, and put it into position. That was just a small part of the job.
That's why nobody replaced the machinery for 110 years. It's also why elevator mechanics are one of the highest paid trades.
They put in a modern gearless traction elevator machine, which is mostly a big motor directly connected to a big pulley. The mechanical part is far simpler now. The controls shrink, too. The old AC-DC motor generator set gets replaced by a box of high-powered semiconductors about a cubic foot in size. The big relay panels get replaced by a microprocessor control box. This is just a 15 story building, so those are all standard components.
Too bad there's no video. Star Elevator did post a video of another job at the Oakland Tribune.[1] That didn't have the access problem from hell.
It was pretty far down there, snuck in between some animated-in photos, but:
> Due to the placement of the machines under the hoistways, and the need for proper rope lead off of the overhead sheaves, the counterweights did not run in the same hoistways as the cars. This makes for a long, complicated rope scheme – each car had over ¾ of a mile of hoistrope!
I guess it makes sense that there's an elevator of the year award, though it's never something I'd have thought of.
The photo of one of the brake assembly components mounted to a welded tubular skid, bolted to a large structure of I-beams, bolted to another I-beam skid which is bolted to the floor, is tickling me as slightly humorous.
I'm sure they thought it was a good idea given the constraints of the time. They also lacked a lot of modern knowledge and so couldn't do it the new way. Likely if someone had tried the new way at the time they would - rightly - criticism how unsafe and unreliable it would be. Modern engineering and electronics have made a lot of improvements in the last 120 years, which in turn makes the modern stuff a good choice now.
Oh, definitely. I just saw a funny parallel with projects even today, where something is done to make something work at the time (and we’ll make it better later), and later never arrives.
My first thought was “there’s an elevator of the year award?” but reading it was fascinating. A lot of planning and work went into executing that modernization project from what was originally a fairly unique system. And 45-50% energy savings per year is a great ROI.
This building is at Market & New Montgomery, and was built in 1907, and has an award-winning elevator.
For some years I worked on the same block, at the corner of Market & 2nd St. That building (605 Market) was built in 1917 and if that elevator wins any awards it’ll be for slowness and low-availability. It was constantly out of service, and when it did run it was so slow that it was faster to take the stairs, even to the top floor.
I was once in the elevator room, among other oddities was the most monstrously large mechanical computer I’ve ever seen, managing the elevator.
I love the photo where assumably everyone involved is posing and smiling and the old guy wearing a high vis vest mean mugging the camera. I bet he’s the one who actually installed the new elevator, or at least the foreman for the work.
My first thought was probably overpriced, hard to use, non-standard garbage, but it looks nice so it wins an award.
Turns out they are replacing the ancient non-standard stuff with modern standard stuff. How the ancients did it before we knew better is interesting - and you can't fault them for not knowing what we know now.
By contrast, the web design is overpriced, hard to use, non-standard garbage. I'm sure that will win an aware despite being an example of how not to do web pages.
I find things like this interesting, I guess everyone finds this normal but,
"Power consumption is down 45% - 50% annually."
Well is it 45 or 50? Is this a measurement or prediction or a random number? From an engineer or marketing? If prediction, why not saying so? Is this a range for several years depending on elevator usage?
But my best guess is they simply _cannot know_ because the usage patterns of the new elevators will be different from the old elevators based on dispatching and sequencing and call systems. In other words, even if they know the exact consumption of the old system, and even if they expect precisely the same number of passengers per day, the _actual operating cost_ will depend on who arrives in the lobby, at what time, destined for which floors, and all other traffic patterns throughout the year.
I think the error bars are too high to say more than that. I doubt they did a measure of the power the original consumed, just an analysis of the system. They likely only have whole building power consumption, where HVAC is the majority of the costs: 1 degree difference in the weather or a couple tenants taking a vacation will make a much larger difference than the elevator.
I wouldn't be surprised if most of the savings was the new lights are LED while the old only incandescent was available - this is just speculation though, I have no idea. Every gear and every stretch of the ropes cost a little bit of efficiency and the modern system has less of those.
The reduction in cable weight probably was a big part of the savings, next to the vfd. Normally counterweights hang from the same sheave as the elevator. Its not clear to me from the sketch, but with the counterweight in different shaft the cable may have run three times the height of the building (the excessive length was noted) and that's a lot of mass to accelerate and brake.
> I wouldn't be surprised if most of the savings was the new lights are LED while the old only incandescent was available
It’s definitely not the lighting, you only need a few thousand lumens to have bright elevator lighting. If you need 4000 lumens, that is (5) 60W incandescent lamps, switching to LEDs that do 100 lumens per watt (8W lamp) saves you 260 watts/hr.
The new elevator uses a VFD (they call it a VVVF) to control the motor which is where virtually all of the gains come from. Lowering the speed of the motor lowers the power usage, it’s a non-linear relationship but a motor spinning at 75% speed uses 1/4 to 1/3rd of the power that it would use at full speed.
> They likely only have whole building power consumption
You can easially measure power by many different means - but I would expect they didn't.
The lights may be running 24x7, while the elevator motor is only running when it is moving, which is why I wouldn't be surprised if they used more power than the motors. Of course I have no information on how this building is used.
they probably haven't had the new elevator in operation for a whole year yet, so they're likely extrapolating. also, they won't really know the true usage of the elevator over the whole year so they're kind of guessing. they know per trip or per pound carried, but they don't know what that translates into actual real world on the power bill
I love that seemingly random trades that we largely take for granted have these case studies that result in awards for things us muggles never think about.
A garage I went to subscribed to a trade magazine for towing and recovery companies and left the issues in the waiting room. Sure enough, they had a recovery of the year type of award.
There are awards for the best awards
https://awardsawards.conferenceawards.co.uk/
I suspect awards are one of the more profitable niches of the wider events industry.
They're cheaper to produce than a full-scale conference (needing just a 1 day hire of a hotel ballroom or similar) and are easy to sell - every business or team nominated for an award will pay for a table, as will various suppliers and vendors who see it as a great marketing opportunity.
you know an award is actually legit when someone from a trade body contacts you the week before sounding slightly put out that nobody from your member company is flying to Europe to attend their event even though you did fill out an application form, you assume their event must be a bit short of attendees but reluctantly dip into the small startup budget for a single person to fly out there because "something something networking", and then your colleague gets surprised by actually winning it whilst surrounded by the teams everyone else sent.
on the other hand, I found it hilarious one of my father's old companies publicly sponsored a special new category of award at a legit-seeming construction event. You'll never guess who won...
I was at one committee meeting when the annual award ceremony came up. One person was considered for an award because she had a big family with many cousins and nieces. All the better to sell tables.
We need a few more of these so we can have the Awards Awards Awards.
It makes me feel uninformed about the world, but in a good way. It leaves me mildly awestruck when I learn about some new invisible corner of our society that has so much more depth than I realized. I appreciate elevators more (both from a safety perspective and as a convenience) knowing there are people who care so much about them.
I worked at a company that got a magazine dedicated to managed printing services.
I used to work at a local paper that also ran a quarterly trade magazine on the chicken processing industry.
I feel like that sounds less weird when you really start to think about it. There is lot of chicken being processed. And the margins must not be great and competition between suppliers must be at least somewhat fierce...
So there are good use cases for capital if you are in that market.
Muggles? You me unskilled overpaid llm prompters who are amazed by the world of real work?
We can't all be wizards at everything, as evidenced by the electrical "surprises" I keep uncovering in this house I own that was built by a plumber.
The staggering number of fonts used on that award [1] is something to behold. I count maybe six?
[1] https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/669edd08b2a3fe...
I count 6 as well, but I can’t tell if “2017” is using its own font. If it is, I see 7.
Fun! :D
It's poetic that this photo is from a storage room for disused things.
The font salad reminds me of the 1980s, when novel desktop publishing apps first gave every computer user a large selection of fonts.
I don't know if it's still running but the hand-operated elevator in Chicago's Fine Arts building on Sth Michigan Ave deserves an award. I always enjoyed having an excuse to visit the music rooms on the top floors. The first time I visited I was worried but seeing the skill of the operator was something else.
https://soundquality.org/2025/04/chicagos-last-manually-oper...
Maybe they shut it down already and are reading Elevator World for replacement ideas. A glass one please!
I wish there was more explanation as to why the original builders decided to make a cat's cradle out of the roping. It's not like you can accidentally run the cables for cab #1 all the way over cabs 2 & 3 because you weren't paying attention during installation.
Because, in the original installation, the elevator machines were at the bottom. That's rare today, but in 1907, getting the heavy machinery up to the top of the building was much harder. Some old elevators have a winding drum at the bottom, and this was apparently one of them. So there was too much wire rope and pulleys involved.
Getting the new machinery up to the top was a miserable job. The article hints at this. "The Metropolis Trust Building is located on one of the busiest corners in San Francisco; so there was no chance to use cranes. And the building itself offered limited access; there was no loading dock or service entrance. All equipment had to enter through the front door – including 20’ pieces of reinforcing steel and 4,000 lb gearless hoist machines." They had to remove two elevators and cabs to get an empty hoistway so they could lift all that stuff. They had to get lifting equipment up to the top. They had an existing elevator to help, but they still had to move stuff from the top elevator stop to the top machine room above, somehow. This brings up images of a lot of big guys, chain falls, small electric hoists carried into position by hand to move larger electric hoists, and lots of temporary steel beams and timber baulks. This was probably night work, because all this blocked the building entrance and lobby. They got a 20 foot steel beam in the front door, into an elevator shaft, hauled it up to the top, got it out, raised it one more floor, and put it into position. That was just a small part of the job.
That's why nobody replaced the machinery for 110 years. It's also why elevator mechanics are one of the highest paid trades.
They put in a modern gearless traction elevator machine, which is mostly a big motor directly connected to a big pulley. The mechanical part is far simpler now. The controls shrink, too. The old AC-DC motor generator set gets replaced by a box of high-powered semiconductors about a cubic foot in size. The big relay panels get replaced by a microprocessor control box. This is just a 15 story building, so those are all standard components.
Too bad there's no video. Star Elevator did post a video of another job at the Oakland Tribune.[1] That didn't have the access problem from hell.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvno4uPnbyQ
It was pretty far down there, snuck in between some animated-in photos, but:
> Due to the placement of the machines under the hoistways, and the need for proper rope lead off of the overhead sheaves, the counterweights did not run in the same hoistways as the cars. This makes for a long, complicated rope scheme – each car had over ¾ of a mile of hoistrope!
I guess it makes sense that there's an elevator of the year award, though it's never something I'd have thought of.
The photo of one of the brake assembly components mounted to a welded tubular skid, bolted to a large structure of I-beams, bolted to another I-beam skid which is bolted to the floor, is tickling me as slightly humorous.
“this is just temporary,” said the construction worker in 1907
I'm sure they thought it was a good idea given the constraints of the time. They also lacked a lot of modern knowledge and so couldn't do it the new way. Likely if someone had tried the new way at the time they would - rightly - criticism how unsafe and unreliable it would be. Modern engineering and electronics have made a lot of improvements in the last 120 years, which in turn makes the modern stuff a good choice now.
Oh, definitely. I just saw a funny parallel with projects even today, where something is done to make something work at the time (and we’ll make it better later), and later never arrives.
To be fair, he wasn't wrong!
Unless I'm missing something, that photo is of the new hoist installation.
My first thought was “there’s an elevator of the year award?” but reading it was fascinating. A lot of planning and work went into executing that modernization project from what was originally a fairly unique system. And 45-50% energy savings per year is a great ROI.
> And 45-50% energy savings per year is a great ROI
For certain values of "I", and depending on the baseline cost of operating an elevator!
(2017), if the pictured award is to be believed
The PDF version[1] metadata lists a modified date of November 2016.
[1] https://static1.squarespace.com/static/669edd08b2a3fe788c227...
2015 is date in one photo... So about right period.
Random off topic trivia
This building is at Market & New Montgomery, and was built in 1907, and has an award-winning elevator.
For some years I worked on the same block, at the corner of Market & 2nd St. That building (605 Market) was built in 1917 and if that elevator wins any awards it’ll be for slowness and low-availability. It was constantly out of service, and when it did run it was so slow that it was faster to take the stairs, even to the top floor.
I was once in the elevator room, among other oddities was the most monstrously large mechanical computer I’ve ever seen, managing the elevator.
I wonder if it’s finally been replaced.
Yeah the article is specifically about replacing the old unreliable elevator with a new modern one.
I love the photo where assumably everyone involved is posing and smiling and the old guy wearing a high vis vest mean mugging the camera. I bet he’s the one who actually installed the new elevator, or at least the foreman for the work.
Fascinating article, thanks for sharing.
I’d be interested is reading a more technical article about the project management part of this process.
Related, one of the most fascinating articles I've ever read:
Up and Then Down (2014) By Nick Paumgarten https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/04/21/up-and-then-do...
That was a long but a fantastic read. Thanks for sharing.
Thanks for this.
My first thought was probably overpriced, hard to use, non-standard garbage, but it looks nice so it wins an award.
Turns out they are replacing the ancient non-standard stuff with modern standard stuff. How the ancients did it before we knew better is interesting - and you can't fault them for not knowing what we know now.
By contrast, the web design is overpriced, hard to use, non-standard garbage. I'm sure that will win an aware despite being an example of how not to do web pages.
I find things like this interesting, I guess everyone finds this normal but,
"Power consumption is down 45% - 50% annually."
Well is it 45 or 50? Is this a measurement or prediction or a random number? From an engineer or marketing? If prediction, why not saying so? Is this a range for several years depending on elevator usage?
Things like this irk me a lot.
Perhaps it ranges (if a measurement).
But my best guess is they simply _cannot know_ because the usage patterns of the new elevators will be different from the old elevators based on dispatching and sequencing and call systems. In other words, even if they know the exact consumption of the old system, and even if they expect precisely the same number of passengers per day, the _actual operating cost_ will depend on who arrives in the lobby, at what time, destined for which floors, and all other traffic patterns throughout the year.
I think the error bars are too high to say more than that. I doubt they did a measure of the power the original consumed, just an analysis of the system. They likely only have whole building power consumption, where HVAC is the majority of the costs: 1 degree difference in the weather or a couple tenants taking a vacation will make a much larger difference than the elevator.
I wouldn't be surprised if most of the savings was the new lights are LED while the old only incandescent was available - this is just speculation though, I have no idea. Every gear and every stretch of the ropes cost a little bit of efficiency and the modern system has less of those.
The reduction in cable weight probably was a big part of the savings, next to the vfd. Normally counterweights hang from the same sheave as the elevator. Its not clear to me from the sketch, but with the counterweight in different shaft the cable may have run three times the height of the building (the excessive length was noted) and that's a lot of mass to accelerate and brake.
> I wouldn't be surprised if most of the savings was the new lights are LED while the old only incandescent was available
It’s definitely not the lighting, you only need a few thousand lumens to have bright elevator lighting. If you need 4000 lumens, that is (5) 60W incandescent lamps, switching to LEDs that do 100 lumens per watt (8W lamp) saves you 260 watts/hr.
The new elevator uses a VFD (they call it a VVVF) to control the motor which is where virtually all of the gains come from. Lowering the speed of the motor lowers the power usage, it’s a non-linear relationship but a motor spinning at 75% speed uses 1/4 to 1/3rd of the power that it would use at full speed.
> They likely only have whole building power consumption
You can easily measure the power of a single circuit or single panelboard using a submeter: https://www.shopemondirect.com/catalog/shop/Shop-E-Mon-Direc...
> saves you 260 watts/hr.
It saves you 260 watts, continuously.
You can easially measure power by many different means - but I would expect they didn't.
The lights may be running 24x7, while the elevator motor is only running when it is moving, which is why I wouldn't be surprised if they used more power than the motors. Of course I have no information on how this building is used.
it also might be a regenerative VFD, unless the fault current contribution was too high and they chose not to
they probably haven't had the new elevator in operation for a whole year yet, so they're likely extrapolating. also, they won't really know the true usage of the elevator over the whole year so they're kind of guessing. they know per trip or per pound carried, but they don't know what that translates into actual real world on the power bill