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Emergency Lighting
Emergency lights are important if your building suddenly experiencing power outage. It helps keep staff calm and assists in evacuating your building safely so it’s important it’s tested regularly.
What is the purpose of emergency lighting?
Emergency escape lighting illuminates to help people safely leave a building, this makes it easy for occupants of a building to safely find the exit by providing clearly lit signs.
How often should it be carried out?
There are two types of periodic emergency lighting testing which should be carried out to ensure your emergency lighting installation remains compliant and fully functional.
‘Flash’ tests are a monthly test which involves illuminating emergency lights for a short period of time to check that the luminaires are in good working order.
‘Duration’ tests are an annual test in which emergency lights must remain illuminated for 1 or 3 hours, thus demonstrating that batteries and lamps would perform properly if required.
Is emergency lighting a legal requirement?
The Regulator Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 states that the person in control of non-domestic premises is responsible for the safety of everyone in the building, this includes providing working emergency lighting.
There are other emergency lighting regulations including: building regulations which provide guidance on where emergency lights should be placed; and the British and European standards define what ‘adequate’ emergency lighting is.
How often should emergency lighting be tested?
Regulations outline that emergency lighting needs to be tested at least once a month.
Flash tests briefly illuminate emergency lights to check they are in good working order and can be carried out once a month by a trained member of staff.
Duration tests need to be conducted at least once a year by a competent person, which is where we can help. To test them, we illuminate the emergency lights for one to three hours.
What we test
We’ll visit your site and test all your emergency lights. This includes looking at the condition, charging capacity and battery drain.
If we find anything wrong with any of your equipment, we’ll let you know what the problem is and how it can be resolved.
We’ll also issue you with an Emergency Lighting Certification and record the testing date for your logbook. We’ll also send you a reminder when we need to come and test your emergency lighting again.