Stair Climber – Clinical Sites

The red machine is a Stanley Handling SC620, our go to for computer chassis and racks. It weighs 46kg itself, carries 310kg up and down, climbs nine steps a minute and will do 300 steps on one full battery charge, which is more stairs than most jobs will ever ask of it. When something is heavier we bring the blue PowerMate M-1, 74kg of heavy duty steel with a lifting capacity of 680kg on the flat, 454kg on stairs with two people and 204kg with one. Its drop down frame lets it move the load along a flat corridor as well, so you are not switching kit halfway. Safes, boilers, servers and full racks all go on it. Both are ours.

A stair climber is only as good as what is strapped to it, so the preparation matters more than the machine. Racks and chassis come out and go into one of our flight cases first where that is sensible, and for a fully populated chassis we use the in house designed split trunks, which break down to just the base so a unit of up to 24u can be slid straight off the server lift and into them before the sides and lid are built back up around it. Corners, thresholds and door frames get protected. Straps, shoring poles and blankets travel on every vehicle, and the machines are cleaned down between jobs so nothing comes onto a clinical floor dirty. We walk the route first and we count the landings.

Most of this work happens outside normal hours because that is when a ward, a lab or a data hall can release the space, and we operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, which is not a strapline so much as an accurate description of the diary. A 47u rack to the tenth floor was one of ours. So was a live chassis moved on dual electric lifting tables. If the building will not take a stair climber at all, we have hydraulic lifters good for 1800kg between the pair and mechanical jacks rated at 1000kg for short flat moves. We would rather survey it first than guess.