Freecurve lost program – Energy saving lightbulbs ?

[JYG]

October 16, 2023 at 12:04 pm

Hi,

My Mum has a Handicare Freecurve from 2022 that keeps losing it’s program, needing an engineer to come out and re-program it (at £100 a time !). The engineer says it is caused by energy saving light bulbs causing interference.

I changed her light bulbs to some old incandescent bulbs last night but in the long term that will be pushing up my Mum’s electricity bill.

I can accept that any electrical device could interfere with remote controls, but why would that cause the chair lift to lose it’s program ? What else could cause that ? Faulty smartcard ? Faulty cmos battery etc. ?

I am not an engineer and I have no intention of touching her stair lift, but I would like to know if my Mum is being ripped off.

Thanks.

[kevin]

October 16, 2023 at 8:19 pm

As the Freecurve uses RF and not optical remotes there is no reason low energy lights should affect it. Some lifts can be affected by CFL type bulbs, this is easily fixed by using LED low energy bulbs – nicer light tone, faster on time and still low energy.
Recently I have come across issues with some models of lift having conflicts with newly installed smart meters where remotes operate in the 2.4Ghz range, again wouldn’t affect the programming, just causes the lift to pick up an odd signal and responds as if its received a remote call.
Most likely is its a smartcard or PCB issue.

[JYG]

October 17, 2023 at 7:24 am

Hi Kevin. Many thanks for your reply.

She did indeed have mini CFL bulbs. I’ve swapped them out for old Incandescent bulbs for now. I’ll check out the LED bulbs. Needless to say the manufacturer didn’t respond to my email, asking them which bulbs are OK.

And thanks for confirming my suspicion that the program loss is more likely to be smartcard or pcb issue. I’ll play along with the lightbulb thing for now, but if it loses it’s program again then I’ll be pressing them to investigate those things more thoroughly.

Thanks again.

[Stannah600RR]

October 28, 2023 at 8:59 pm

I agree with Kevin, change all your light bulbs to LED which cost less to run than CFL anyway and should not interfere with anything. 60w filament = 11w CFL = 6w LED as a rough guide.