Commercial Blog

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.

Is your business is a high electricity user? If so you could benefit from funded battery storage, enabling you to reduce your electricity bill by avoiding peak time electricity surcharges (TRIAD charges and Red Band DUOS charges).

If your mains lighting failed what would you do? Evacuate? Stay put? Use the daylight coming through the skylights or the windows to keep working?

Many organisations have emergency lighting, but it's amazing how few employees/occupants know what the drill is if the lights fail.  A fire alarm going off sends a recognisable message to get out. In contrast, without a clearly communicated policy, normal lighting failing and emergency lighting coming on is more likely to spread confusion, particularly in an environment where carrying on 'normally' is possible without the mains electricity working.

Furthermore, we see quite a few buildings in which the emergency lighting and / or signage hasn't been brought up to regulations - primarily the 2016 updated standard BS 5266. 

Does your business comply with the following? If not you’re at risk of prosecution:

As a rule of thumb, with the decline in Feed-in Tariffs and the advent of battery storage, a grid-connected commercial solar system is best sized with an annual output (kWh) approximately equal to the annual load of the business / property.  

So if your load is 36,000kWh a year, and a kWp outputs 900kWh a year, size the system at 40 kWp.

What if your roof is too small to achieve this with standard panels? Which panel do you turn to?

Spirit’s warehouse adjoins the warehouse of Primrose, the online gardening retailer. Our unit is full of solar panels, inverters, batteries, LED lights and exciting things like that.  Their unit is full of garden furniture, water features, awnings, wind spinners and all of the exciting things available at www.primrose.co.uk.

Earlier this year we were called in to upgrade the metal halide lights to LED.