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Emergency lighting plays a critical role in building safety and particularly in an evacuation scenario. It's designed to provide prompt, automatic lighting in an emergency situation where the main power supply is cut and the normal mains lighting fails. Emergency lighting acts as a lifeline in hazardous situations – reducing panic, delivering essential illumination and guiding the occupants of a building towards safe exit points.
There are many circumstances in which the activation of emergency lighting becomes necessary, including mains power failure, evacuations or fire hazards where reduced visibility requires additional light sources. The selection of emergency lighting products is dependent upon its primary purpose, which may be emergency exit lighting, escape route lighting, standby lighting, open area (or anti-panic) lighting, the illumination of exit signs, specific lighting for high-risk task areas or a combination of the above throughout a building.
Emergency luminaires come in two modes of operation: maintained and non-maintained.
Maintained
Maintained means that the emergency luminaire is on at all times: in general use as part of the general lighting system and during an emergency with power backup. Typically, maintained emergency luminaires are used in public spaces and in leisure facilities such as cinemas and clubs where the lights are dimmed when occupied.
Non-maintained
Non-maintained luminaires only come on when the power supply of the normal lighting fails. Usually, non-maintained luminaires are used in buildings in which the general lighting system is turn on when they are occupied.
When you start designing an emergency lighting system for a commercial property, the first things to consider is in related to the building design. It is essential that the system will fit the building type and use. A deep understanding of the building and its users is crucial when considering the right emergency lighting products for your project.
There are four major topics with regards to building design that you should keep in mind when designing an emergency lighting system: building user profiles, building type and usage, building scale and complexity and life cycle considerations.
An emergency lighting system is build up from a wide range of products, such as safety luminaries, exit signs, beam lights, portable lamps, convertors and information signs.
Besides the 'standard' emergency lighting products, you can also select more advanced products with the latest technology. These advanced products are designed for faster and safer evacuations in case of emergencies, for example, Increased Affordance systems with exit signs that blink or Adaptive Evacuation systems that show occupants the safest escape route based on where in the building an incident happens.
To ensure that emergency lighting is fit for purpose a combination of standards and regulations covers all aspects of its safety.
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