My neighbor, a retired firefighter, said he always checks the elevator recall system first on any service call in a high-rise, which got me thinking about our usual troubleshooting order.

He mentioned a 2018 incident in Chicago where a smoke detector fault in a lobby kept pulling cars to the ground floor during a real fire drill, and now I'm curious if anyone else has a 'start here' step that seems counterintuitive but actually saves time.

4 comments

4 Comments

phoenix_martin401mo agoTop Commenter

That story about the Chicago lobby smoke detector is a perfect example. It reminds me of a weird one we had where the main floor call buttons were shorting from salt spray off the road. Every time it snowed, we'd get phantom calls bringing the elevator down for no one. Took forever to find because we kept looking at the car buttons first.

hannahcraig1mo ago

Yeah, salt spray is a pain, and @corah75 is right about the Chicago thing too.

baker.christopher2d ago

Honestly, that salt spray thing is brutal. We had a similar issue in a building near the lake where the road salt would build up on the contactors in the machine room, not even the call buttons, and it would just randomly trigger the fire recall. Took three different elevator guys before someone thought to check the non-security part of the system.

corah751mo ago

Wait, that Chicago story is a bit off. It was a faulty heat detector, not a smoke detector, in the machine room. The recall kept activating because of dust buildup on the sensor, not during a drill. Always check the recall panel first, but don't trust the first story you hear about why it failed.