Lee Smith – 5 Stars

I just had gone through two back surgeries so I was struggling to get up the steps but thanks to Handicare, I’m getting up and down the stairs now. I found the company through the ConsumerAffairs’ site and their free-form stairlift conformed to our stairwell much better. During purchase, a young man designed a program which was very good. They have a computer-aided design system that let us put down little markers and they can calculate the chair lift/chair slope for the rail all the way up. I could see a computer-generated illustration of what it looks like in our stairwell or how much of the stairwell it takes up. Also, the product’s made separately in Holland, assembled and tested, before it comes here to be put in. One guy started installation then another joined him later on. I let them have their space because they had a lot of parts to put together and they did it well within the time that they said they would when it got here. And it works. The chair is self-centering even if we have vicious slope changes. We have a two-run staircase with a one-step well halfway up. So, the chair has to go up, level out, change, and then guide itself into a climb to get up. It pulls down around the bottom of the stairwell all the way into a parking place. It’s perfect and our landing is big enough that it’s far enough away from the stairwell that I don’t lose any traffic to it. And it folds out of the way, too. So far, I would recommend Handicare. Their system, though a bit more expensive than the others, fits our needs better.