Buying Your First Two Post Lift in Urbandale: Symmetric or Asymmetric?

We get a call most weeks that sounds roughly like this: a homeowner in Urbandale finished a three-car garage or a pole building, he’s tired of crawling around on a creeper doing oil changes and suspension work on the family fleet, and he wants a real lift. Then he starts reading forum threads and hits the wall everybody hits \u2014 symmetric or asymmetric? Overhead or floorplate? 9,000 or 10,000 pounds? The terminology around automotive two post lifts is genuinely confusing if you’ve never worked around one, and the internet is full of confident answers from people who’ve never anchored a column. Here’s the straightforward version, written by people who install this equipment in Iowa garages for a living.

Start With Your Ceiling, Not the Lift

Almost every home buyer starts by picking a model and then measuring. Do it backward. Get a tape measure, find the lowest point in your garage ceiling \u2014 usually a garage door track, a light fixture, or an HVAC duct \u2014 and write that number down. Then measure the tallest vehicle you own with the antenna down. Subtract, and that’s the working room you actually have.

A typical Urbandale three-car attached garage has a nine-foot ceiling. That’s tight. An overhead two-post model needs roughly 11 to 12 feet of clear height to be worth owning, because the crossbar eats the top of your envelope. In a nine-foot garage, you’re looking at a floorplate design with the connecting bar across the floor, and even then your maximum lift height will be modest \u2014 enough to sit on a stool under the car, not enough to stand fully upright under an SUV. Pole buildings are where things open up. We do a lot of work in 30×40 and 40×60 posts frames around Polk and Dallas counties with 12 to 14-foot sidewalls, and those handle full-height overhead automotive two post lifts with room to spare. If your building isn’t up yet, ask us before you finalize the truss height. Twelve feet costs almost nothing more than ten at framing time and changes everything later.

Symmetric Arms: The Original Layout

Symmetric means the two columns face each other straight across, and all four arms are about the same length. Your vehicle parks dead center between the posts, half in front and half behind. It’s the oldest configuration and it’s rock solid \u2014 the load sits right between the columns, which is exactly where an engineer wants it.

The problem for a home user is doors. When the car is centered, the B-pillar \u2014 the post between your front and rear door \u2014 ends up near the lift column. You open the driver’s door and it hits steel, or comes close enough that you’re squeezing in sideways and eventually you’re going to scratch the paint on the car you built the garage for. On a pickup with tall doors and high sills it’s less of an issue. On a Miata, a Camaro, or a Golf it’s a daily annoyance. Symmetric setups also shine when you’re lifting long-wheelbase stuff \u2014 full-size vans, dually pickups, a car hauler trailer’s tow vehicle. If your garage is genuinely truck-only, symmetric automotive two post lifts are simpler and often a few hundred dollars less than the asymmetric equivalent.

Asymmetric Arms: Why Most Home Buyers End Up Here

Asymmetric rotates each column inward about 30 degrees and pairs short front arms with long rear arms. The vehicle ends up sitting back \u2014 roughly a third of it in front of the columns, two-thirds behind. The practical result is that your driver’s door swings into open space. You get in, you get out, nothing touches the columns.

For a home garage doing general maintenance \u2014 oil changes, brakes, exhaust, suspension, tire rotations \u2014 that door clearance is the feature you’ll notice every single time you use it. It also puts the columns forward of the front wheels, which opens up the front wheel wells for brake and hub work. The limitation is load distribution. Asymmetric geometry expects a car-like weight split, and the manufacturer publishes a front/rear load ratio you’re supposed to respect. If your heaviest vehicle is a long-bed diesel, asymmetric is the wrong tool. But if you’re like most of the homeowners we talk to \u2014 a daily driver, a weekend car, maybe a half-ton pickup \u2014 asymmetric is what we recommend nine times out of ten. Also worth reading: our overview of the best 2-post lifts for a home garage.

Concrete: The Part Nobody Wants to Hear About

This is where home projects go sideways. A two-post lift transfers everything \u2014 the vehicle’s weight plus the leverage of the arms \u2014 into four to six anchor bolts per column. Those anchors need real concrete underneath them. Most manufacturers specify a minimum of four inches of cured 3,000 PSI concrete for a 9,000 or 10,000 lb unit, and some want more.

Here’s the honest reality we run into in central Iowa: residential garage slabs are frequently four inches nominal, which means they’re four inches in some places and three and a half in others. Pole building slabs poured by the owner’s cousin with a bobcat are a total wild card. We’ve cored slabs that were advertised as six inches and came back at four and three-quarters. Before you order, we’d rather you drill a small test hole in a corner of the bay and measure, or have us come out and check. If the slab is too thin, the fix is straightforward \u2014 saw out two pads, dig down, and pour footings sized to the manufacturer’s spec. It’s a day of work and a few hundred dollars in material, and it’s a lot cheaper than an anchor pulling out with your car in the air. Concrete depth is the single most common reason a home order for automotive two post lifts gets delayed, so check it early. More detail in our concrete requirements guide.

Capacity: Don’t Overbuy, Don’t Underbuy

Capacity is the easiest decision on the list and people still get it wrong in both directions. Weigh what you own \u2014 not the towing capacity, the curb weight. A modern midsize sedan is around 3,500 lbs. A three-row SUV is 4,800 to 5,500. A half-ton crew cab pickup runs 5,000 to 5,800. A three-quarter-ton diesel can hit 8,000.

For a home garage with cars and a half-ton truck, a 9,000 or 10,000 lb unit is plenty and gives you a healthy margin. Nine thousand is the most common home-garage rating and it’s honestly enough for the majority of buyers we talk to. Step up to 12,000 if there’s a heavy-duty pickup or a work van in the mix. Going bigger than you need isn’t dangerous \u2014 it’s just more expensive, heavier to install, and it demands thicker concrete and longer anchors, which can turn a simple install into a slab project. On price, expect the entry tier for a decent 9,000 lb home unit to land in the low-to-mid four figures, with commercial-grade Rotary and Challenger models running meaningfully higher. Installation, if you want it done for you, is typically a day of labor plus travel. We’ve had buyers tell us they didn’t want to spend big money on a lift, and then buy the better one anyway once they understood what the price difference actually bought them in cable quality, lock mechanisms, and parts availability ten years out.

Install It Yourself or Hire It Out?

Plenty of people assemble their own. If you’re mechanically capable, own a rotary hammer, can get a hand lifting a column upright, and can follow a torque spec, it’s a doable weekend project. The manuals are decent. The parts that trip people up are hammer-drilling clean, straight anchor holes to full depth, torquing the anchors to spec with an actual torque wrench, and setting cable equalization so both carriages rise together and the safety locks engage in sync.

What we’d push back on is the “I’ll figure out the concrete later” approach. Anchor placement relative to control joints and slab edges matters \u2014 you need a minimum distance from any joint or edge, and drilling into a joint is one of the more common failures we get called out to look at. If you install it yourself, at minimum have someone qualified verify the anchors and cable tension before the first vehicle goes up. We do that as a standalone service call across central Iowa and it costs a fraction of a full install. And regardless of who assembles it, plan on rechecking cable tension after the first month \u2014 new cables stretch during break-in on all automotive two post lifts, and equalization drifts as they do.

What We’d Tell You Over the Phone

If you called us from Urbandale tomorrow, here’s the conversation. First question: ceiling height at the lowest obstruction. That determines overhead versus floorplate before anything else. Second: what’s the heaviest and longest vehicle going on it. That sets capacity and pushes you toward symmetric or asymmetric. Third: how thick is the slab, and do you know or are you guessing. Fourth: do you want to store a car on it long-term, because if the answer is yes we’re going to steer you toward a four-post instead \u2014 a two-post is a service lift, not a parking lift, and leaving a car hanging on the arms for six months isn’t what it’s designed for.

For the typical Urbandale homeowner doing general maintenance on a car and a light truck, in a garage or pole building with 12-plus feet of height and a verified slab, we usually land on a 10,000 lb asymmetric overhead unit with three-stage front arms. That configuration covers a low sports car and a lifted pickup without adapter gymnastics. If your ceiling is nine feet, we’ll steer you to a floorplate model or ask whether a mid-rise scissor would serve you better. There’s no single right answer among automotive two post lifts \u2014 there’s only the right answer for your building. Call 800-674-9302 with your measurements and we’ll sort it out in ten minutes. See also our comparison of two-post versus four-post lifts.