The introduction of two key European Directives in 2005/2006 changed the face of emergency lighting–and most particularly emergency lighting testing–forever. These two Directives–EN50172 Emergency escape lighting systems and EN62034 Automatic testing for battery powered emergency escape lighting–opened the door to new opportunities in the emergency lighting domain, and brought with them implicit challenges. Paul Wilmshurst explains
To-date, many of the challenges faced when implementing emergency lighting schemes have derived from a disjoint in conventional design approach. Emergency lighting schemes have traditionally been addressed by disparate systems–systems that are typically split along the boundaries of architectural and commercial energy management lighting.
The 2005/2006 European directives, coupled with significant advances in lighting control and monitoring technology, are creating a trend towards a more holistic approach to emergency lighting system design. This approach ‘engineers in' the emergency lighting functionality–most notably the mandatory testing regime–across the building or campus as a whole, rather than patching together disparate systems, or tacking on testing functionality as an afterthought.
Such holistic emergency lighting system design is empowered by four key technologies: advanced luminaire communications, centralised system monitoring tools, total campus distributed control architectures, and the increased use of campus-wide Ethernet backbones.
Innovative luminaire, ballast and inverter control and monitoring protocols – such as DALI and DALI's extended command-set, (which is currently under industry discussion) – provide the system ‘eyes and ears'. Complementing this, user-friendly PC-based graphical control and monitoring interfaces provide a centralised ‘total view' of the entire lighting installation, both operational and emergency. Powerful lighting system distributed control architectures empower the holistic design, by providing ubiquitous connectivity across the entire building or campus. Increasingly, such distributed control architectures are complemented by a building- or campus-wide Ethernet backbone, allowing system-to-system bridging, plus connectivity to services outside the building, such as Internet monitoring and e-mailing of event alarm notifications.
These four core technologies, coupled with advanced lighting system design, are underpinning an essential holistic view of the building emergency lighting network. Together, they are empowering a new generation of emergency lighting testing – one that is seeing automated and semi-automated testing actually engineered into the system itself.
