• • • LIGHTING & LIGHTING CONTROLS • • •
Emergency lighting dashboards E
mergency lighting is a core element of any lighting installation in publicly used buildings. Escape route, open area and high-risk task lighting are the most common emergency installations, ensuring a building can be safely occupied or evacuated when normal illumination fails.
A legal requirement in all public, commercial and high occupancy residential buildings, it is a key element of any design brief, but often the process can be flawed, putting lives at risk. Legally required under the Regulatory Reform
(Fire Safety) Order 2005, The Health and Safety at Work Act, Building Regulations, The EU Workplace Directive and the Fire Safety Regulations, the stringent luminous requirements for emergency escape and standby lighting are specified under the European Standard BS EN 1838. The consequences for building owners who fail to comply with fire safety legislation and emergency lighting rules can be very serious,
resulting in fines or imprisonment in cases where occupant safety has been put at risk. Every building project will have its own specific emergency lighting requirements and new installations must be designed in consultation with the building’s architect, lighting designer or fire risk assessor.
During this specification process, one of the key factors to be considered and explored is ongoing testing and maintenance. Again, a requirement by law, emergency lighting installations must be regularly tested and maintained in accordance with the latest regulations, to ensure they are fit for purpose. Commonly, emergency lighting systems require either manual testing or incorporate self-test products.
When a manual test is carried out, once all lighting circuits and luminaires have been isolated, a tester has to pass through the whole building or circuit, checking that each emergency luminaire is
When embarking on an emergency lighting installation, one of the key considerations for specifiers during the design stage should be the ease of maintenance and testing, says Chris Anderson, technical manager at Ansell Lighting
operating correctly. The mains supply is then restored and the whole building or circuit must be walked again to check that the emergency lights have returned to being operational To make this process easier for building managers, many emergency products now incorporate intelligent self-test emergency technology within the luminaire, eliminating the need for manual testing and speeding up the process.
When the unit is first installed the fitter will randomly select a test date of between 200 and 365 days. Once this date is set it will continue to test at the same time every year. Every 30 days the installation will also be automatically tested for ten minutes. A small LED button on the fitting will illuminate to show either regular function or that a fault has occurred.
Whilst self-test systems clearly have the advantage over manual testing, these fittings in isolation do not always go far enough to ensure compliance and still require a healthy amount of manual input to monitor their performance. Thankfully, as has been the case in many areas of the lighting industry in recent years, advancements in new technology are helping to provide a solution to these problems entirely, making the control and maintenance of emergency lighting systems more straight forward, cost effective and timely.
Lighting dashboards are one such technology. At the touch of a button they allow emergency lighting installations to be automatically and wirelessly tested; providing a visual display of a building’s lighting system in one place. They can even highlight remotely whether an individual luminaire or driver is outside of expected operational parameters.
Hugely efficient, they can provide insight and access to emergency lighting systems throughout a number of buildings or estates – not just singular installations - improving the speed of testing and maintenance and removing the need for costly and time-consuming manual checks.
Dashboards are also a great support when it comes to management and reporting. Alongside providing full real time visibility of compliance status at all times, dashboards store historical test reports and data logs for all connected buildings and systems. This enables those responsible for building maintenance to access information whenever it is required, supporting compliance requirements.
The usefulness of dashboards doesn’t just apply to emergency lighting systems. If required, they can be applied for all lighting installations, providing building managers with enhanced controllability and the data required to ensure buildings are operating efficiently.
20 ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING • APRIL 2023
electricalengineeringmagazine.co.uk
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