Emergency lighting needs to be checked every month. Any repairs or remedial work must be carried out within a reasonable time and all changes must be recorded.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that a significant proportion of organisations do not regularly test and maintain their emergency lighting.
This is partly because standards have changed (BS 5266 was updated in 2016) and the relevant people may be behind the times. But it’s also because testing emergency lighting every month (and annually for a three hour test) is rather laborious and labour intensive, and therefore expensive.
The fines for non-compliance are even more expensive.
Installing the right test mechanism to make compliance easy is fundamental.
Let’s say you have 50 emergency fittings. How much will it cost to test them manually?
You have to test as follows:
Cost: 3-4 hours for someone to walk around, test and record in log book. Around £100 per month, 12 months = £1,200 per year.
On top of that there will be maintenance costs, particularly if the lighting is old. Allow another £250 minimum for maintenance.
So the true cost of manually testing and maintaining 50 emergency lights is going to be in the order of £1850 per annum.
There are essentially two ways in which to automate testing:
This is the simplest ‘stand-alone’ type of automatic testing. The self-test emergency luminaire checks itself to ensure that the fitting is fully operational, and the result of the automatic test is usually indicated through a single bi-colour LED on luminaires.
Depending on the system, the luminaires typically initiate an emergency functional test every 8-28 days and a duration test every 13 to 26 weeks. They are easy to install and there is no need for the key switch mentioned above.
Note that the responsible person will still need to make monthly visual checks to monitor the fault LEDs, and results of tests still need to be recorded manually into a log book. However, the person recording information does not need to put installations into test and wait to see whether the rated discharge duration is achieved and need not be electrically qualified. Qualified personnel are only needed to rectify faults and re-set systems.
It is important to ensure that adjacent luminaires do not test at the same time, which would leave an area without emergency cover whilst the batteries are recharging. All emergency luminaires that use stand-alone automatic testing need to find a way around this problem, such as delaying the testing of alternate luminaires.
To avoid having to record test results by hand, there are a range of automatic test emergency lighting systems which connect emergency luminaires to a remote control panel where the results are collected centrally, either via data cabling or wireless link.
These systems are easy to retrofit and achieve regulatory compliance with minimal hassle.
Benefits are as follows:
If the fire officer calls and asks to see your test records, they’ll all be there, beautifully organised, without you having to get up from your chair.
The cost of upgrading our 50 luminaire system would be in the order of £10,000: hence just over a 5 year payback. The luminaires all use LED, and have an expected life of around 15 years, and, for maintained luminaires (i.e. emergency lights that are on when the normal mains lighting is on), much lower running costs than the non-LEDs that they are probably replacing. When the 50% saving on running costs are taken into account, the payback time can fall as low as 3 years.
In summary, by installing an Automatic Test System you can achieve three things:
If you would like advice or assistance on upgrading the test mechanism for your emergency lighting, please call us on 0118 951 4490.