With old age or incapacitating injuries, one’s mobility is highly affected and impeded. Moving around becomes a challenge, especially in the case where one’s environment does not have the specialty facilities and appliances to enable physically challenged individuals to move around.
In the case of a moving up and down a flight of stairs in a typical house, the process not only becomes a challenge but also a health risk. Due to experiencing diminishing strength, the risk of falling down is exacerbated immensely.
Additionally, you need to keep in mind, that whilst injured or suffering from health complications that come with old age, you might not have the requisite strength for you to move independently up and down a flight of stairs. As such, your independence is heavily affected. Furthermore, you experience lowered productivity as you cannot carry items around your house.
As you can imagine, such a life with negated freedom is a huge challenge. However, with the installation of a stairlift in your house, you can significantly improve your mobility and ability to move around. Stairlifts also reduce the risk of injury due to falling. Finally, this appliance, regardless of its simplicity, improves your productivity, which ultimately improves your quality of life.
With the benefits of the stairlifts in mind, let us delve into understanding the stairlifts in an in-depth manner.
Stairlift Designs
Even though stairlifts as a technology is quite old, with the first stairlift emerging as early as the 1920s, the technology has remained fairly the same. Just like it was during the infancy of the technology, today we have two varieties of stairlifts, which include the straight-rail stairlift and the curved railed stairlift.
Straight-Rail Vs Curved-Rail Stairlift
The straight rail is designed and installed in a straight flight of stairs with no bends, curves, or even landing. The flight of stairs should not have any divergence of gradient and direction for this particular stairlift to work. Importantly, being simplistic in form and design, this type of stairlift tend to cost the least in installation before the added extra are incorporated into the system. On average, the straight-rail stairlift cost between $3,000 and $5,000.
On the other hand, the curved railed stairlifts are designed and meant to accommodate some kind of divergence in general steepness and direction of the flight of stairs. Therefore, if your house’s flight of stairs has some curvature, bend, or landing along it, this is the system you will most likely go for. You should also note that due to the intricate design of the curved-rail stairlift, it does cost more. On average, the installation of the curved-railed stairlifts, even without the added extra features can cost anywhere between $10,000 and $15,500.
Power Source
Having looked at the two varying stairlift designs, it is important to have an intricate understanding of the issue of powering source. A stairlift may be powered using alternating current or direct current, with either power source influencing the performance of the system as well as the cost.
With the AC option, the stairlift tends to be more powerful as it sources its energy directly from the mains. However, due to the excess power, the system tends to be noisier to operate.
On the other hand, DC option operates using a battery, which is charged for the system to draw power from. The DC option tends to be a tad quiet than the AC option while at the same time offering smoother operations. However, it is more expensive due to the additional components added to the system.
Comfort Features
At 321 mobility we understand that being a personal mobility system, stairlifts are inherently designed to be easy to customize and personalize so as to fit individual users. For instance, you can opt to have your seat designed to have and ooze a premium feel. Such a chair has ample comfort and offers better user experience when compared to the standard chair. Additionally, you can opt for an extra wide chair for extra stability while using the stairlift. Finally, you have the option of choosing the raised chair option to cater for your tall build if that is your physique.
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