Hospital Bed Repair

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swalker

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Joined
Dec 11, 2014
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1,594
Reason
DX MND
Diagnosis
07/2014
Country
US
State
CO
City
Vail
My hospital bed is pretty old (I would guess about 20 years). It was donated to a woman whose husband was a PALS.

After he passed, she donated it to the local ALS Association. Due to the difficulty of moving the bed out of her house, the ALS association simply left it in her house for storage.

Shortly after her husband passed, we met and became friends with this woman. After several years, she let us know that she still had the hospital bed. That was about the same time that I was looking for a hospital bed.

She coordinated with the ALS Association so that we could be the recipients of the bed. Once this was done, we hired a company to move it out of her house (required four very strong people and some very intricate maneuvering), drove it about 100 miles to our house set it up in the bedroom I use.

In the process, the bed's right armrail was bent, but mechanically still functioned OK.

When I started using the bed, I discovered the control on the right arm rail for elevating the bed did not work (the one on the left did work).

The bed also has a contour function that raises the knees an appropriate amount when the head is being raised. That worked about 70 percent of the time, but regularly failed.

After living with this for awhile, I finally decided we needed to try to see if we could fix it.

The bed is a Hill Rom Advance P1135. I was able to download the service manual for it and deduced the problems with the controls were likely electrical in nature, and could have been as simple as a wiring harness not being properly plugged in or having corroded contacts.

We approached the job by trying to open up the armrail. There were no instructions on how to do it and it was a bit mysterious which screws and bolts needed to be removed. After working on it for about an hour, we got it apart and found that one of the two wire harnesses was partially unplugged.

We plugged that back in and the reassembled the armrail. When we plugged the bed in, we found that all the functions worked as they should.

The right armrail is still bent, but that bend does not interfere with its operation. Other than that, the bed seems to be functioning correctly.

I love the bed and am so glad to have it!

Steve
 
That is great!! glad you can be functional and comfortable
 
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