Emergency Lighting
Under the Fire Safety Order 2005 which became law on the 1st October 2006 it is now mandatory to undertake a written fire risk assessment. As part of this legislation the risk assessor must consider Emergency Escape Lighting and appropriate Signs and Notices.
All persons in your premises must be easily able to find their way to a place of total safety using escape routes that have sufficient lighting. Escape routes without windows or escape routes in the premises that are used during the hours of darkness (including winter afternoons) are likely to require backup lighting i.e. emergency escape lighting.
Emergency Lights come in two forms; maintained emergency lighting and non-maintained emergency lighting. Both are designed to provide illumination during an emergency through backup battery power and must conform with the recommendations of BS5266, BS EN 1838 and BS EN50172.
Maintained Emergency Lighting forms part of the normal task lighting in the premises but in the event of a mains supply failure illuminates automatically from the standby batteries.
Non-maintained lights aren’t normally illuminated and do not form a part of the normal task lighting but automatically illuminate if the mains supply to the normal task lighting fails.
It should therefore be ensured that the emergency lighting is directly connected to the normal task lighting circuits in areas to be provided with emergency escape and anti panic lighting and not to dedicated or other circuits. Test key switches should be provided locally to the emergency lighting to allow monthly testing of the luminaires to be carried out.
Emergency lighting systems may be made up of either a central battery system with luminaires fed with fire resisting cables or as self contained luminaires with batteries contained within the fittings or a combination of the two types of system.
Both non maintained and maintained, central battery systems and self contain luminaire types of emergency lighting should be maintained. A maintenance contract is the best way to ensure compliance with the British and European standards is being met.
Signage (which may be a combination of Photoluminescence signs, illuminated signs and signs lit by emergency lighting) should also be used where appropriate to help persons in your premises identify escape routes and locate fire fighting equipment and emergency fire telephones and are required under the Health and Safety (Safety Signs and Signals) Regulations 1996.
