Lighting Services Blog

Emergency exit lights are fixtures in most modern buildings. They are familiar enough that we may take them for granted despite their essential role. What may be less familiar to some is the fact that these lights must undergo regular inspections. Building managers should be aware of the fact that these lights are installed to make fast egress possible in emergencies. How well they function can literally make the difference between life and death for a building's occupants. If you manage a building, you should understand the laws that govern emergency and exit light inspections. 

Emergency and Exit Lighting Regulations 

The National Fire Protection Administration (NFPA) is one of the organizations that govern emergency and exit lighting. You can find the various rules on emergency and exit lights in the NFPA's Life Safety Code. The most important of these rules dictate factors like: 

• The placement of emergency and exit lighting. The NFPA's rules specify the location of signs and how floors should be illuminated. No point in an exit access area should be beyond 100 feet or the sign's rated viewing distance, whichever distance is less. 
• The amount of emergency illumination. Emergency lighting should not be less than one lumen per square foot. At no point should maximum illumination at any one point exceed 40 times the minimum illumination. The point of this is to prevent overly bright and overly dark areas.  
• How long emergency lights should last in an emergency. The NFPA states that emergency illumination should not last for less than 1.5 hours on full battery power in the event that normal lighting fails. 
• The schedule for inspecting emergency and exit lighting. You should inspect emergency and exit lights every month. The NFPA's code also specifies that the monthly functionality tests of emergency and exit lights should last for 30 seconds. They also advise that building managers keep written records of monthly inspections. These records are important since the local authority having jurisdiction may require them. No more than five weeks should pass between monthly inspections. Along with the 30-second tests, building owners and managers should test emergency and exit lights once per year for 1.5 hours. 

Fire safety is one of the biggest reasons that building codes mandate emergency exit lights, but it isn't the only reason to have these fixtures. In fact, fire is thankfully rare in buildings that comply with local building codes. This makes it so that emergency exit lights are usually activated in other situations. Here are some of the most common ones:

    Big businesses are always on the lookout for a good way to benefit their company, but they sometimes focus on the inside of their buildings to find them excluding the exterior. This is a problem when it comes to regular light maintenance and replacement. It skips the following advantages. 

Serious Money And Energy Savings  

    It's always a good time to think about replacing your current exterior lights. It can save you a lot of energy and money if you have old MH lights which can use up to 324 watts in your parking lot. Replacing just half of them with LED lights can cut your exterior's energy expenditure by up to 70%. You can imagine how much your electricity bill can drop after that considering that the US Energy Information Administration reports that the national average spent on electricity is 13.05 cents per kilowatt-hour. 

     Even if you don't replace your exterior and parking lot lighting with LEDs, keeping them maintained and regularly replaced reduces how much light is consumed and how efficiently that energy is used. Lights lose their oomph as they age, illuminating less over time. This is a waste of money since they consume energy at the same rate, but you can develop a schedule of replacing bulbs before they dim to keep their efficiency.

Interior and exterior lighting are more than simply lighting a path for people to find the building or their path while inside. Lighting is also in place for emergencies as well as to adhere to fire code.

     When there is an emergency in your business, school, warehouse or other building, you need to make it easy for people to evacuate. This can be extremely difficult when it's pitch dark. Rather than trapping everyone inside, you can use emergency exit lighting.

If you've seen LED Lighting Upgrades in the news lately and thought "Eh, no big deal," you may be in for quite a surprise. We're fairly certain that ignoring it could be detrimental, and we're going to explain how.

It's important that you meet all mandatory fire code regulations              at all times. You never know when there will be Fire Marshall inspections to see what's going on within your building. Various forms of equipment need to be present in your building.

Lighting plays a major part in making products look more appealing, and this should become something to think more about in your retail store. Even though you're perhaps using older lighting systems in your retail store, have you had an inspection done lately?

Emergency exit signs are in every public building that is up to code, but what many people don't realize is that the best ones offer more than the word "exit." They also include bright spotlights that make it easy to spot any obstacles, find doors, and find the way around corners. Without these lights, an exit sign is far less useful.