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LIGHTING
Make sure your emergency lighting is always ready Emergency lighting is an essential safety requirement for any building. Uninterruptible Power Supplies director Alan Luscombe explains how a well-designed, correctly specified and properly maintained battery backup system can ensure the lights come on when they need to
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he presence of emergency lights that operate reliably when called upon and provide sufficient illumination along all escape routes could make the difference between safe evacuation and panic, injury or even death. Accordingly, emergency lighting is an essential part of any building services installation — and subject to extensive British and European legislation. Emergency lighting, by definition, depends on a continuously charged battery backup power source. The lighting can detect a mains power failure and switch to battery backup automatically and immediately. The battery power source must be welldesigned, well-maintained, always fully charged and ready for use, and highly reliable. Wider understanding The Industry Committee for Emergency Lighting has published a guide to emergency lighting design, intended to give engineers a wider understanding of the different types of MCP June 2017
emergency lighting and their correct application. The guide references the British and European standard BS EN 1838, which specifies the luminous requirements for emergency escape lighting and standby lighting systems installed in premises or locations where such systems are required. It is principally applicable to locations where the public or workers have access. The overall objective of emergency escape lighting is to enable a safe exit from a location
in the event of failure of the normal supply. The guide shows specific forms of emergency lighting, as shown in Figure 1. The emergency escape lighting allows safe exit if the normal power supply fails, and forms part of a building’s fire protection system. Escape route lighting allows safe exit from buildings by illuminating escape routes and ensures that firefighting and safety equipment can be readily located and used.
Open area or anti-panic area lighting reduces the likelihood that people panic while enabling safe movement of occupants towards escape routes. Highrisk task area lighting ensures the safety of people involved in a potentially dangerous process or situation, and allows proper shutdown procedures to be completed for the safety of other occupants; for example, protecting people from dangerous machinery. Standby lighting allows normal missioncriticalpower.uk