Soon after Sharon was diagnosed with ALS, we moved into a home with no steps. It’s ideal for Sharon’s wheelchair — she has no trouble going anywhere in the home, or going out through the front door or the garage. But not everyone has the luxury of a no-steps home. So if your home has steps then you’re going to need to think about a ramp to get in and out of the house — initially for a walker but later for a wheelchair.
Even if you don’t have steps at home, or even if you’ve added a ramp at home, you’ll find that most of your friends and family don’t live in houses with no steps, so you’ll quickly learn that you have two choices:
- Never visit other people’s homes
- Get a portable ramp
We elected to go with #2. We ended up buying two different portable ramps: a three-foot ramp that works for a couple of steps, and a ten-foot ramp that works for bigger climbs. Both ramps are made by the same company, LiteRamp, which specializes in making folding aluminum ramps for wheelchair users.
ADA Guidelines
LiteRamp has a ramp selection guide on their website, but here’s the basic information you need to know. The ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) recommends at least one foot of ramp for every inch of “rise” (the height you need to climb). You should certainly follow this recommendation when you’re building a ramp for your home. It works well for people with walkers or for people with manual wheelchairs.
Portable Ramps Can Be Different
However, when you’re looking for a portable ramp to use with a power wheelchair, I think the ADA guideline is too conservative. You can certainly get a ramp this long, but if you measure the typical height of most front steps you’ll quickly find that you’re going to need an exceptionally long ramp in most cases. And despite their ability to fold, longer ramps are still large, cumbersome and heavy.
The user’s guide for Sharon’s power wheelchair recommends a climb angle of no more than nine degrees, which works out to be about one foot of ramp for every two inches of rise. That means that we can use a ramp that’s half the ADA recommended length.
In practice we’ve found that the three-foot ramp will handle one or two normal steps, in some cases with a little bit of pushing from the caregiver. We bought the ten-foot ramp for homes with more steps, but we haven’t had too many opportunities to use it, so I don’t know yet what its limits are.
A 10-Foot Ramp is Not a Substitute for a Shorter Ramp
You might think that the easy solution is to buy a ten-foot ramp to carry around in your car or van. After all, you can use ten-foot ramp for a lot of steps or just a few steps, right? And the opposite isn’t true: You certainly can’t use a two- or three-foot ramp when you have more than a couple of steps.
The thing you’ll quickly realize when you look at these ramps is that the ramps get much heavier as their length increases. After all, these ramps have to support a 300-pound wheelchair plus its occupant. So while a three-foot ramp weighs just 16 pounds and measures about 36 inches by 15 inches by 2.5 inches (it folds in half lengthwise), the ten-foot ramp weighs 57 pounds (about 28 pounds for each of its two pieces) and measures about 68 inches by 15 inches by 9 inches (68″x15″x4.5″ for each of two pieces). The three-foot ramp fits easily into a car trunk or the area behind the back seat in a van. The ten-foot ramp is too long for many spaces and requires some thought to figure out how you’ll pack it.
You Need Room to Turn Too
When you’re planning on using a ramp, remember that you may need to turn the wheelchair at the top and bottom of the ramp, and at the bottom of the ramp you’ll need a bit of extra room to slow down before turning. This extra space requirement is often an issue when you’re trying to take a power wheelchair into a home through a garage entrance where the garage door opens into a narrow hallway.
Your best bet is to scout out possible entrances at a home before you commit to a visit. Look at all of the possible ways to get into the house: the front door, the garage door, even a sliding door in the back. Then pick the route that offers the easiest access within the limits possible with the ramp(s) that you have.
So How Long a Ramp Do You Need?
Look at the guide on the LiteRamp web site. The site even includes a calculator that lets you enter the height of your steps in order to calculate the ramp length required. LiteRamp offers portable ramps in lengths of 2′, 3′, 4′, 5′, 6′, 7′, 8′ and 10′. You can buy your ramp directly from LiteRamp or through Amazon.com. Pick the ramp that meets your needs, and remember to allow for turning space at the top and bottom of the ramp as well as slow-down space at the bottom of the ramp.
Practice Before Using
When you get the ramp, try it out first using a gentle slope, then work your way up to using it on steeper slopes. It’s tricky to navigate a power wheelchair up and down a narrow ramp. And although there are guarding curbs to keep you from running off the ramp, you could probably jump over them if you hit them at speed. So practice until you’re comfortable with the ramp you have, and then exercise extreme caution when moving up and down the ramp. Ramps can be incredibly convenient, but remember that they can be dangerous as well.
