Leading power management company Eaton has announced it has launched a ‘Fundamentals of Emergency Lighting Guide’ to empower consultants, planners and building owners to implement best practice emergency lighting systems. The guide aims to highlight the importance of essential illumination for guiding occupants, via safe routes, to critical locations and vital resources – reducing panic and saving lives in building emergencies.
Eaton’s ‘Fundamentals of Emergency Lighting Guide’ details six easy to navigate sections, including:
- What is emergency lighting?
- The role of emergency lighting should a threatening event occur.
- How it delivers peace of mind for building owners/operators as well as ensuring compliance.
- How Emergency lighting should function in the event of power failure.
- Understanding system approaches
- To help understand the characteristics of two key emergency lighting technologies: Self-Contained (SC) and central battery systems (CBS) also known as a central power supply (CPS) or low power supply (LPS) system.
- Manual and automatic testing processes.
- Choosing the right products
- Understanding the core luminaire and sign types available.
- Customised and advanced technologies that are now available and are pushing the boundaries of traditional emergency lighting design and thinking.
- Choosing the right system for your needs
- Understand about the building, user and task risk factors that govern selection.
- Considerations around life cycle costs and maintenance.
- Examples of systems illustrating risk mitigation.
- Planning for compliance
- To help understand the core EU compliance framework.
- Specifics around sign and luminaire specification, location and viewing distances.
- Creating a complete system
- How individual components combine to create a complete system.
- How to check your understanding of emergency lighting.
Emergency lighting market leader Eaton offers more than 50 years of expertise built up through a brand heritage that embraces CEAG, as well as leading national manufacturers including Luminox, Blessing and Menvier. Eaton works closely with national and international industry organisations, including the Industry Committee for Emergency Lighting (part of Lighting Industry Association) to advocate for regulatory change and ensure the highest standards of regulatory compliance, safety, reliability and efficiency are being met across Europe.
Anthony Martindale, field product manager at Eaton, commented: “There’s no room for cutting corners when it comes to protecting life and property. You wouldn’t put your family at risk in your home, and the same mentality should apply for building employees and residents. Whether it be a fire or terror attack, an effective emergency lighting system acts as a critical lifeline in emergency situations.
“We built the ‘Fundamentals of Emergency Lighting Guide’ to help building owners, facilities managers and electrical contractors to start the conversation around implementing best-practice emergency lighting systems and to show the value of the investment.
“A good emergency lighting system not only saves lives but enables buildings to comply with ever-tougher legislation. For building owner or occupiers, the wrong – or substandard – emergency lighting system leads to at best, premature failure of luminaires increasing operational costs, and at worst, loss of life. Furthermore, designers and decision-makers who select or install the wrong or substandard emergency lighting can see, at best, damage to relationships with their clients, and at worst, substantial fines or imprisonment.”
Martindale concluded: “Every building is different and there is no one size fits all approach. The industry needs to be moving from a basic, ‘fit and forget’ attitude to bespoke solutions that evolve overtime based on the changing nature of risk. Decision-makers need to reduce risk by asking the right questions in the buying process to achieve compliant, safe, reliable and effective emergency lighting. We hope this guide will help enable them to be more confident throughout the buying process.”
The launch of Eaton’s ‘Fundamentals of Emergency Lighting Guide’ follows the launch of two new Eaton emergency lighting products, the DualGuard-S central battery system and the VisionGuard Intelligent emergency lighting visualisation software.
Eaton is one of the largest manufacturers of emergency lighting in Europe and protects some of the world’s most iconic buildings from stadia to metro systems, including Emirates Stadium.
You can register and download now, to be one of the first to receive Eaton’s new ‘Fundamentals of Emergency Lighting Guide’ here.
