Emergency Lighting
Intelligent emergency lighting enables building control and better safety
By Russ Sharer, Vice President of Global Marketing and Business Development for Fulham Co– manufacturer of innovative and energy-efficient lighting sub-systems and components for lighting manufacturers worldwide.
just fixtures that burdened the facilities staff with maintenance, they are now proving to be ideal end points for a wireless building intelligence system. Strategically placed emergency lights are required by safety regulations, and since they cover an entire building they also make ideal repeaters for a building control network. Maintaining emergency lighting always has been a headache for facilities managers. Regulations require regular testing of safety luminaires, which means walking the building, testing functionality and health of the batteries, and ultimately logging the results. LED luminaires have simplified this somewhat since they feature red/green indicator lights to indicate readiness and health as required by the BS EN 50172:2004 / BS 5266-8:2004 safety standards, but they still need to be manually inspected. What if you could eliminate the need for visual
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inspection by centralizing and automating safety luminaire monitoring? Connecting luminaires into a common network enables remote testing and diagnostics, including issuing instructions and logging tests from a central location. Automating inspection saves time and resources, but more importantly, it also creates a ready-made communications infrastructure for other uses. For example, once you have connected
emergency luminaires installed you can use the same infrastructure to handle sensor data for other systems including HVAC and security. First, however, you have to connect
emergency luminaires into a wireless network.
Start with Programmable Emergency Luminaires Emergency luminaires that use select LED power supplies have microcontrollers so they are programmable. Normally, LED luminaires are programmed to adjust for brightness, hue, energy efficiency, and other characteristics, but
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mergency luminaires are finding a new role in building automation. Where emergency lights were once
there is no reason you can’t program them for other functions as well. In an ideal world, programmable emergency luminaires should offer: 1) The ability to remotely test systems from anywhere, anytime;
2) Support for real-time emergency monitoring; 3) Remote monitoring and maintenance alerts; 4) Data gathering for analytics; 5) Integrate with other emergency and building automation system, and
6) Enable remote commissioning as well as software updates. Smart emergency lighting also can make buildings safer. For example, sensors embedded in emergency luminaires could be used to pinpoint the location of a fire or emergency. Or by applying machine intelligence the emergency lighting network can issue instructions to light the way to a safe exit. Of course, to add centralized intelligence requires reliable communications.
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