Stair Lift Rental Benefits

The benefits of having a residential stair lift installed in your home are many, but one of the major drawbacks of this type of installation is the cost. There is, however a viable alternative to buying a home stair lift and that is to rent one. If you'd never thought of this option but have been suffering with not being able to climb the stairs in your home, this could provide you with a cost effective alternative to buying one outright. Let's take a look at the benefits of stair lift rental over those of owning one in its own right.

Of course the main benefit of renting home stair lifts is in the greatly reduced initial cost. Now this initial cost is what prevents many people from purchasing a lift for stairs in their home as it is often way beyond their budget. But the initial cost of renting is much less and can be much more easily afforded by someone who needs this kind of help in their home.

The downside is that once you rent a handicapped stair lift, you may have saved a lot of money on the first payment, but you are then obliged to keep up with the monthly payments in order to keep your stairlift. There is usually a minimum lock-in period that you also have to agree to in order to have a rental stair chair lift installed in your home. This is fine if you only envisage needing the stair lift for a few months or so. But if your intentions are to have one installed on a more permanent basis, then the continued monthly payments will eventually exceed the outright purchase price and you will still never own the stair lift in your home.

For this reason, you may want to consider another financially viable option which is buying a home stair lift on finance terms. That way, if you can meet the down payment and keep up with the monthly terms, then in, say, two or three years you will make the final payment and the device will be yours. It is also worth your while checking out with the local authority to see if they provide grants for the installation of residential stair lifts to help you meet the costs.

But if these options are not suitable for you and stair lift rental is the only affordable option open to you, then before you sign a rental agreement contract, you should first make very sure that you are aware of what that contract includes. This will mean reading the small print and checking for carefully hidden clauses that could lock you in to the contract for longer than you might expect. You should also be sure that you will be provided with everything you are expecting to be provided with and that there are not a load of add-on extras that you will end up paying more for.

As a general rule of thumb, at the time of publishing this article in 2010, you should be expecting to pay a deposit of anywhere from $1200 to $2000. This initial price should cover the installation of the unit and its power supply as well as any ongoing maintenance and breakdown cover as well as the cost of dismantling and removal at the end of the contract. Once the initial deposit has been paid, you should then expect a monthly rental bill of something like $100 to $200. This price will of course depend upon the model you are renting.

One quirk in the rental business is that you will generally only find straight stair lifts available to rent. The main reasons for this is that they are the easiest and cheapest to install and the units cost less than curved rail units that often have to be custom made to fit an individual flight of stairs. Additionally, many rental models will have been rented to other people before you so they will be used stair lifts. This is not generally an issue except that model types, designs and colors will have limited availability, so you should ask first before committing yourself.

Whether you choose to buy outright for cash, on finance or with a credit card, or you opt to rent your home stair lift, you will be adding an item to your home that will provide you with easy access to the upper floor or floors of your home that may, for whatever reason have become inaccessible to you. This makes such a device a wonderful and necessary addition to your home's itinerary and you'll soon realize that it is something that you cannot do without. For this final reason, you may prefer to buy rather than rent if your finances can be stretched to make this possible, as in the long term this is the most cost effective means of having a stair chair lift installed in your home.

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