Wide base interferes with a hoyer lift
I give this product four stars. That said, we may return it. Here’s the story.
My wife was diagnosed three months ago with ALS (a progressive, fatal, motor neuron disease). (Bulbar onset - the fast kind). Including the three months before diagnosis, she went from a relatively active and mobile 59 year old woman to being completely disabled. She is unable to walk, can barely lift a cup, has seriously slurred speech, and basically lives in a power chair in the day, and a hospital bed at night.
We use a machine called a “hoyer lift” to lift her from the chair or bed and place her onto the commode.
For many months, we could lift her to a walker and she would shuffle to the bathroom but her legs no longer work well enough to do that. We had a standard size portable commode for her bedside for her “bad days.” Now, every day is a bad day.
Her standard size commode fits nicely between the legs of the hoyer lift. It was easy to lift her, move her on the lift away from her chair or the bed, position the commode under her, remove clothing, and set her down.
Unfortunately she is about 100 lbs overweight and a standard commode felt narrow, especially with the arms. So we decided to try a commode with a wider platform and bought this item.
What we like: the wide platform is comfortable and does not constrain her. The product is sturdy (although the 300 pound weight limit is curious, since this product would mostly appeal to people who are excessively obese).
What we do not like:
1. The waste bucket does not lift out like it does in a standard sized portable commode. It slides out the front. This is awkward and dramatically increases the possibility of spills.
2. You cannot put the lid onto the waste bucket, or remove it, while it is in place. This means when you are awkwardly trying to slide the bucket forward from its clamps, your nose is a few inches from an open bucket that can easily spill.
3. The base is actually wider than the platform by about three inches. As a result, it does not fit between the legs of the hoyer lift. The only way to use the lift to place my wife onto the commode is to retract the legs to their “storage” position **with her in the air**. That’s dangerous and far outside the recommended use of the lift.
Therefore, if you are getting this product for a person who depends on a hoyer lift to move them, think twice. It’s seriously problematic.
One minor nitpick— when the product arrived, we could not find the assembly instructions. So I used the photo on Amazon to guide me. I ended up building it according to the photo. We found the instructions inside the waste bucket at the very end.
So what’s the nit? The photo on the website shows the product built incorrectly.
Not horribly wrong. It shows the washers under the head of the bolt, not under the nut, on the eight bolts that affix the platform to the legs. I followed the photo even though I found that odd. The instructions show the washer under the nut, not against the head of the bolt.
My advice: look for the instructions inside the waste bucket.