Troubleshooting A Hospital Bed At Home

In prolonged illness or terminally ill patients, you have no other choice but to take the patient home. Some people provide home health care to their loved ones by choice. This is a scenario in which hospital beds are needed at home. Electric beds are ideal because they allow even the slow recovering individual to get easily in and out of bed. Besides, with automatically adjustable feet and a head region of the bed, the position of the recuperating person can be changed. The support from adjustable positions helps in alleviating different pains and aches that result from lying in the same position for a long time. Although electronic beds have trouble free operation, you may need to service them for maximum efficiency. Your last resort for repair is to call a repairman but there are a number of things you can do to troubleshoot the hospital bed at your place. First of all, insert the electric plug of the bed in an outlet. Check whether the outlet’s Ground Fault Circuit Interrupter is on. Also check the breaker box to make sure that the circuit is currently on. Before moving on to the next step, look for any obstacles blocking the hospital bed . Keep the bed in a position where it stays away from any other furniture as well as from the walls. Lift the mattress to check if there is any obstruction between the springs of the bed and the mattress. In case the bed rail locking pin has worn out, there is a way to check it out. Add a few drops of oil to the locking pin. If you see it fall then it has certainly worn out. Replace this bedrail locking pin with a new one. rnOperate the bed to move it up and down. Do it continuously in opposite directions until the bed stops in one direction. This simply means that it has reached its maximum extension possible in one direction. This is an essential part of maintenance to check the optimum working of the electric bed. Observe the underside of the bed for any pinched cables. If you find any such cables, there is a possibility that the damaged cables can affect the functioning of the bed. This can result in stuttering movements while raising or lowering the bed. Try to untangle those cables but make sure the main cable is unplugged while you do it. Before removing the main cable, make sure none of the buttons remain pressed in the control box. Otherwise, the bed will keep moving until it reaches its maximum elevation. Wipe the buttons with a clean cloth to unstick them so that each button performs the task for which it was assigned. If you still feel that the bed moves in the opposite direction than the button you press, the gears are probably connected to the opposite driveshaft. Fix that only after unplugging the cable. After reconnecting those driveshaft cables to their appropriate gear, switch on the electric supply to check the movement. When you want the hospital bed to stay in position, lock all its casters. This will prevent the bed from unwanted movement. Hospital bed casters become unlocked in due course. Therefore, you need to check those casters occasionally. When the head raising or lowering is not working properly, you have to look for the pull tube. Normally, there can be a problem in the rod connection when you find the bed is having elevation or lowering issues. To avoid this problem, you can firmly lock the T-shafts.