Emergency Escape Lighting

The primary purpose of emergency escape lighting is to illuminate escape routes, but it also illuminates safety equipment.

The size and type of your premises and the risk to the occupant will determine the complexity of the escape lighting required.

In larger, more complex premises a more comprehensive system of fixed automatic escape lighting is likely to be needed. This will be particularly true in premises with extensive basements or where there are significant numbers of staff or members of the public.

In warehouses and large open plan areas of factories, an efficient and effective method of illuminating escape routes in an emergency is using spotlights. These are usually self-contained units consisting of a battery, switching mechanism and spotlights fitted to operate automatically on a circuit or mains failure.

You will have identified the escape routes when carrying out your fire risk assessment and need to ensure that they are adequately lit. If there are escape routes that are not permanently illuminated by normal lighting, such as external stairs, then a switch, clearly marked ‘escape lighting’, or some other means of switching on the lighting should be provided at the entry to area/stairs.

An emergency escape lighting system should normally cover the following:

• Each exit door
• Escape routes
• Intersections of corridors
• Outside each final exit and on external escape routes
• Emergency escape signs
• Stairways so that each flight receives adequate light
• Changes in floor levels
• Windowless rooms and toilet accommodation exceeding 8m2
• Fire fighting equipment
• Fire alarm call points
• Equipment needed to be shut down in an emergency
• Lifts
• Areas in premises greater than 60m2

Emergency escape lighting can be ‘maintained’ i.e. on all the time, or ‘non-maintained’, which only operates when the normal lighting fails. Systems or individual lighting units (luminaires) are designed to operate for duration of between one hours and three hours. In practice, the three-hour design is most popular and can help in maintaining limited continued use of your premises during a power failure (other than in an emergency situation).

To complement emergency escape lighting, people, especially those unfamiliar with the premises, can be helped to identify exit routes by the use of way-guided equipment. Way-guidance systems usually comprise of photo-luminescent material, lines of LED’s or strips of miniature incandescent lamps, forming a continuous marked escape route at a lower level. These systems have proved particularly effective when people have to escape through smoke, and for partially sighted people. They can be particularly useful in premises where they can provide marked routes on floors and in multi-storey premises they can direct people to escape routes that are seldom used.

All emergency escape lighting systems should be regularly tested and properly maintained to an appropriate standard. Most existing systems will need to be manually tested. However, some modern systems have self-testing facilities that reduce routine checks to a minimum.

Depending on your type of installation you should be able to carry out most of the routine tests yourself. The test method will vary. If you are not sure how to carry out these tests you should contact your supplier or other competent person.

Test facilities often take the form of a ‘fishtail’ key inserted into a special switch either near the main fuse board or adjacent to relevant light switches.

Particular care needs to be taken following a full discharge test. Batteries typically take 24 hours to fully recharge and the premises should not be re-occupied until the emergency lighting system is fully functioning unless alternative arrangements have been made. See BS 5266-8 and BS 5266-1 for more information.