What is emergency lighting?
Emergency lighting is part of the
fire safety provision of a building. It is a legal requirement for non-domestic premises and the common areas of a House in Multiple Occupancy (HMO) so is your emergency lighting up to scratch? Its purpose is to provide illumination if the mains electricity fails so that the building’s occupants can safely find their way out.
Emergency lighting stays on even when the mains powered lights go out. The lights will illuminate for around three hours and then recharge when the power is back on.
There’s a sub-category of emergency lighting, standby lighting, that provides illumination for usual activities to continue in the event of a power cut. As this type of lighting isn’t a legal requirement, the remainder of this article will focus on emergency lighting only.
It’s the duty of the responsible person (the nominated individual responsible for the building’s fire safety) to ensure that the building has sufficient emergency lighting and that it works.
Is your emergency lighting up to scratch?
To establish what emergency lighting you need in your building and ensure you comply with the emergency lighting regulations, start with a fire risk assessment. This process will identify the risks and help you plan where you need lighting.
Since the primary purpose of emergency lighting is to enable the swift and safe evacuation of a building, the lights will need to illuminate the escape routes, such as corridors and stairways. They should also highlight the location of fire-fighting equipment as mains power outages are often due to fire.
Your emergency escape lighting systems must be regularly tested and maintained to an appropriate standard. At least monthly, you should test that each emergency lamp illuminates. Annually, you’ll need to do a full discharge test to ensure that the lights stay alight for the entire discharge period and that the batteries are recharging.
After a full discharge, batteries typically take 24 hours to recharge. So, the premises mustn’t be re-occupied until the emergency lighting system is fully functioning again.
If you’d like to get your emergency lighting up to scratch, we can design and install new systems or maintain and update existing lighting. We can also provide a full
fire risk assessment with our accredited surveyor. For a no-obligation quotation, please
get in touch.
