26/06/2020
With the days getting longer and lighter and summer just around the corner, it may not seem like a pertinent time to think about emergency lighting maintenance, but power outages could still harm business. Although exterior lighting installations outages could be mitigated by the increasing levels of daylight, hazardous area lighting and internal fixtures being without power could lead to serious inflictions of health and safety and at worst, injury or accidents. Make sure your company is protected and up to date using our emergency lighting checklist as a guide.
Types of Lighting
Some emergency lighting maintenance checks can be carried out by facilities managers, namely the mandatory monthly checks of all installations. This should cover all electrical installations including ‘maintained’ and ‘none maintained’ fittings. Maintained emergency lighting works on a standard light fitting and is controlled with all other lightings. When power fails, it will operate at a lower lighting level.
Non maintained emergency lighting normally remains off but will display a green LED that indicated whether or not the batteries are charged and when power fails, the fitting switches the battery supply on. These fittings are not connected to the general lighting and are usually used for emergency exit signs.
Combined emergency lighting has 2 or more lights and at least one of which draws power from the regular supply while the other(s) draw from an emergency supply.
Emergency escape lighting automatically powers on when normal supply fails and can give off enough light to allow occupants to exit the building safely.
Schedule
As well as emergency lighting maintenance being conducted monthly by a facilities manager, a full test needs to be carried out once a year by a competent person, or in other words a professional electrician. These tests are in place to ensure that all backup power supplies are working to their full capacity, by simulating an emergency outage. Once complete, the electrician will provide a report on their findings and make any recommendations for the system that will improve the safety of staff and the continuation of business.