Last June, CEN TC10 submitted to its members and the European National Standardisation Organisations (NS0s) the proposal to launch the formal vote on the new edition of the standard EN 81-80 (Rules for the improvement of safety of existing passenger and goods passenger lifts). The 2018 project standard addresses all the comments received from the NSOs after a CEN Enquiry in 2016 negatively assessed the first proposal. This time, the NSOs voted to launch the formal vote, which is expected to be completed by the end of 2018.
EN 81-80:2003 was developed to establish a methodology to specify, at national level, procedures for improving the safety of existing lifts. The standards provided technical specifications for the voluntary implementation of Recommendation 95/216/EC of 8 June 1995 concerning improvement of safety of existing lifts.
More than six million lifts are in use today in Europe and approximately half of them were installed more than 20 years ago. These lifts were installed to the safety level appropriate at the time of installation, so they now inevitably have different levels of safety. However, users expect a common minimum level of safety wherever they go. A full revision of the original lifts standard was thus needed to take into account the new state-of-the-art reflected in EN 81-20 and the experience gained from application of EN 81-80:2013.
The main changes in the new edition of the standard can be summarised as follows:
- Eleven new hazards have been added: some of them are newly covered by EN 81-20, the others come from the experience acquired since the first publication of EN 81-80;
- Following the inclusion of the new hazards mentioned above, the drafters changed the numbering to keep a logical order of hazards in line with the sequence in EN 81?20:2014;
- The methodology for identifying the hazards, the evaluation of the hazardous situations and the risk levels, as well as the classification of priority levels including the filtering process, have all been moved to chapter 5;
- All technical requirements for protective measures have been incorporated in the checklist in the normative Annex A. The latter now combines the previous chapter 5 and the previous checklist in Annex A;
- The checklist also contains a column in which the risk levels and subsequent priority levels for items in compliance with EN 81?1/2:1998 or items upgraded according to EN 81?80:2003 are listed in relation to today’s state?of?the?art, according to EN 81?20:2018.
