Title 24 Elevator and Escalator Requirements
Elevator cab lighting is capped at 0.6 watts per square foot and cab ventilation fans at 0.33 watts per cfm, with both switching off after 15 minutes idle. Escalators in airports, hotels and transport buildings must slow automatically when nobody is riding.
Elevators are caught without a size threshold
Unlike the rest of the covered process section, there is no square footage or capacity trigger here. If the building has an elevator, the requirements apply — and they apply both to new nonresidential construction and to existing elevators undergoing major alterations involving mechanical equipment, lighting and/or controls.
That second half is the part that catches refurbishment projects. A modernisation that replaces the controller and the cab interior engages these requirements even though the shaft and the building are untouched.
Cab lighting: 0.6 W/sq ft, with a carve-out
Luminaires inside the cab are limited to a lighting power density of 0.6 watts per square foot. Interior signal lighting and display lighting are excluded from that density.
The exclusion is sensible and useful: floor indicators, call buttons and information displays are there to be legible, and holding them to a power density would trade safety and usability for a trivial saving. It is the general illumination of the cab that is capped.
A cab is a small floor area, so 0.6 W/sq ft is a genuinely small wattage — this is a requirement that assumes LED, and a decorative cab lighting scheme can exceed it easily.
Cab fans: 0.33 W/cfm, and only some cabs
Cab ventilation fans must not exceed 0.33 watts per cfm measured at maximum speed. This applies to cabs without space conditioning — a cab with its own cooling is a different case.
Note the measurement condition. It is fan efficacy at full speed, which is a fan selection criterion rather than something a control strategy can rescue later.
The 15-minute shutoff, and the exception that matters
Where the cab is stopped and unoccupied with the doors closed for more than 15 minutes, cab interior lighting and ventilation fans must switch off until operation resumes.
And then the important part: the controls must allow lighting and ventilation to remain operational if the cab is stuck with passengers inside. The energy requirement is explicitly subordinate to not leaving people in a dark, unventilated box. Any control implementation has to distinguish a genuinely empty idle cab from a stalled occupied one — the requirement is not a simple timer.
Escalators: slow down when nobody is riding
Escalators and moving walkways located in airports, hotels and transportation function areas must automatically slow to the minimum permitted speed, in accordance with ASME A17.1/CSA B44, when not conveying passengers.
The location list is the scope. A department store escalator is not caught by this; an airport or transit concourse escalator is. Those are the places where units run continuously for eighteen hours a day with long genuinely empty stretches — and where slowing rather than stopping keeps the unit immediately available.
"Minimum permitted speed" is deliberately deferred to the safety standard rather than set here. The energy code says slow down; ASME A17.1/CSA B44 says how slow is safe.
Two acceptance tests, both field-technician eligible
Elevator lighting and ventilation controls are tested on NRCA-PRC-12-F and escalator and moving walkway speed control on NRCA-PRC-13-F. Both carry the -F suffix, so a field technician may perform them rather than a certified acceptance test technician.
In practice the elevator contractor's own technician is usually the person who can demonstrate the 15-minute shutoff and the stuck-cab behaviour, which makes the -F designation genuinely useful rather than a technicality.