Most unusual project

Grahams Letter Box Lift - Cedia 2007 Awards entry and finalist

This is without doubt the most ambitious custom designed project we have installed to date. In this day and age where many people have very advanced homes with high technology, this is the one of the features that makes this house a talking point.

As soon as the post box is opened, a message is displayed on the Crestron touch screen to say there is post. The lift can then be called up to the 1st floor hall. It travels along an aluminium extruded track (around 7m in length) that runs up through the garage and then is pushed up through an opening in the concrete slab up into the 1st floor hall, around 1500mm into the hall.

We had to fit safety sensors to detect any over sized mail (such as a poster tube) and if anything like this is detected, the lift simply moves out of the way and stops in the garage, with a warning message displayed on the touch screen.

The micro controller that is the intelligence behind the lift mechanism varies the speed of the lift and slows it down as it reaches the end of the travel. The final movement is to push the hopper up through the concrete slab floor which then pops open the flap in the hall floor above.