There are many things to think about when choosing your electric wheelchair and which leg rest style and type you go for is an essential to ensure both comfort and manoeuvrability aren’t in any way compromised.

The main choice will be between a single centre mounted footplate or to have a single swingaway leg rest mounted on both left and right hand sides of the chair.

Good posture when sitting in an electric wheelchair is very important, especially for those who may be sat for many hours in a day. Your chair should always be adjusted to suit your individual needs, wishes and to maintain as much comfort and support as possible.

With many ways of transporting or travelling in your electric wheelchair in a vehicle there can be many considerations to take. From hoist capacities, to crash test requirements and seat to floor heights, there are some fundamental requirements depending on how you and your chair will be transported.

One of the key elements to making sure your electric wheelchair will perform as you need it to do is to make sure that the batteries are correctly maintained. However, this can be a little confusing as most electric wheelchair batteries are now ‘gel’ batteries and are described as ‘maintenance free’!!

In essence, they are indeed maintenance free and only need a good and regular recharging process to make sure they will last as long as possible before needing to be replaced.

With lots of options and accessories available on electric wheelchairs it inevitably means that there are a number of things that can either wear out or potentially have a fault during the lifetime of the chair.

For the majority of failures an engineer visit with replacement parts is a simple process to getting your chair up and running again. However, some issues, especially if they involve some of the powered components, can take a bit more investigating to get to the route of the problem. Thankfully most modern day joystick and powered components have built in fault alerts and can be diagnosed through software based on a PC or handheld device.

With so much choice available in the market, you may often try to find out how much an electric wheelchair costs. There are often so many variables that it is not always clear and easy to see why some chairs cost an amount and others are priced quite differently.

There are five main things to take into account when you are looking for a price of an electric wheelchair and these will hopefully give you more of an understanding as to why prices can vary from under £1000.00 all the way to £30,000.00 and more