Why Your Business Needs Emergency Lighting

Your business should always be prepared in case of an emergency, this means having a certain number of procedures in place to ensure the safety of you, your customers and your staff. This includes having emergency lighting in your building. It’s easy to see having emergency lighting as a tick-box requirement; however, you do need to think about what’s involved to make sure your lighting passes the test.

It’s a statutory requirement that all businesses must have emergency lighting and this is so, if for whatever reason your place of work suddenly goes into darkness, you’re still able to see using the emergency lighting, reducing the number of risks and dangers for the people inside the building.

There are numerous emergency lighting systems available, so it’s vital that you establish which lighting system is right for your business before you have it installed as they vary in catering for different types of emergencies in different premises. The point of having emergency lighting is that your evacuation path will be fully lit and easy to navigate if your building suddenly goes dark. You want to be able to lead people out easily and safely.

There are three main types of emergency light systems; escape route lighting, open area/anti-panic lighting and high-risk task area lighting.

Escape route lighting is designed to provide people with a swift and safe evacuation of a building by illuminating its escapes routes in an event of a fire or any situation where people need to leave the building quickly.

Large public areas such as shopping centres or museums, to reduce panic and disruption in the case of an emergency evacuation, open area/anti-panic lighting is fitting to aid the identification of escape routes and exits to guide the possible significant number of visitors who will not be familiar with the layout of the building.

High-risk task lighting is essential for the safety of people involved in a potentially dangerous process or situation. You would typically find them in areas that have systems, machines or processes that need to be monitored. You’ll only find this type of lighting across a limited range of scenarios.

At Circuit Compliance, we’re committed to ensuring that our customers have a full overview of and confidence in the intrinsic safety of their emergency lighting installations! To find out more, head over to Emergency Light Testing services.