Emergency lighting testing is a critical part of building safety management. But sometimes, it doesn’t always get the attention it deserves. Required testing and record keeping is so frequent that any adhoc or unplanned tasks can send an entire testing schedule haywire.
Automation removes this stress. It takes emergency lighting testing off your to-do list and frees up your resources.
With new advances in technology existing emergency lighting can be turned into an automatic testing system with minimal intervention. So no matter the size and age of your building or the number of emergency lights you have making the move to automation is easy.
Background on Automatic Testing Systems
DALI based automatic testing systems for emergency lighting have been around for several years and have clear advantages over manual testing.
DALI is a lighting communication protocol used to automate emergency lighting testing. At Safecility we use DALI as part of our technology.
Automatic Testing:
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- Saves time
- Saves carbon emissions traveling from building to building
- Saves labour costs
- Human error is eliminated
- Gives advanced fault analysis
- Out of hours testing is simple
- Paperwork is automatically generated (except with stand alone self-test lighting)
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The term automatic testing refers to both self-test emergency lighting and complete end-to-end automated systems. You can find our short guide to the different types of testing systems here.
Of the two, end-to-end automatic testing is definitely the way to go, especially when you’re responsible for a large amount of emergency lights. However before now it wasn’t easily attainable for many building owners due to cost, difficult installation and lack of flexibility.
Wired Systems
The first iteration of automatic testing systems were wired and they still have their place in the market today.
Wired testing systems are expensive to install as extra cabling is required. The disruption caused by extra wiring is also a hurdle that makes wired systems less than ideal for retrofitting into existing buildings.
Wireless Systems
Newer wireless testing solutions then came to the market.
Wireless automatic testing systems give all the benefits of a traditional ATS but are far easier to install. However, in most cases these systems are tied to specific lighting brands meaning buildings with functioning emergency lighting would need to completely change over their emergency lighting to a new brand of light to be able to avail of wireless testing.
Agnostic Wireless Automatic Testing Systems
At Safecility we’ve developed a wireless emergency lighting control sensor that works with any brand of light.
Using DALI it transforms existing emergency lighting into a full wireless automatic testing system. Testing and record keeping is taken care of, and you can view a full historical audit trail and real-time results via the portal 24/7.
You may be wondering do you need to have DALI lighting to be able to use Safecility. The answer is yes…and no. Safecility needs DALI to operate but thankfully it’s very simple to convert non-DALI emergency lighting over to DALI.
Safecility’s Retrofit Emergency Lighting Controller
My current emergency lights are not DALI enabled, can I use Safecility?
Yes you can.
If your emergency lighting is not currently DALI enabled don’t worry – we can install an DALI inverter to make the light compatible.
It only takes a few minutes and can be installed at the same time as the sensor for minimal disruption.
Have more questions? Take a look at our FAQs
