Use LED’s for your Emergency Exit Lighting

Buildings accessible to the public, including office buildings, warehouses, retail stores, and manufacturing facilities, are required to have emergency exit lights to show the path to the emergency exits as well as the emergency exit doors.  It is important that your emergency exit lights be properly placed within your commercial building and it’s also important that your exit lighting function properly, even in a total power outage.

Emergency exit lights should be hooked up to a battery backup power source to ensure that when the power is cutoff the exit lighting will last several hours.  In addition to the power source and backup, you should also consider the type of materials and fixtures that will be used for your emergency exit lighting system.  You want your system to provide adequate illumination to assist people in case of emergency.

The most common solution today for emergency exit lighting systems is to use LED diodes.  We’ll examine a few reasons why LED’s are the best and most cost effective option for your emergency exit lights.

1. Minimum power consumption in an emergency: LED’s require much less electricity that most other forms of emergency exit illumination (incandescent; fluorescent).  Generally it takes a lot of electricity to generate light, but due to the efficiency of LED’s, they require much less.  That’s why LED’s have become so popular in homes and businesses.  The fact that LED’s consume much less electricity means that your emergency exit lights will continue to shine for a longer duration on the battery backup system, which is critical when the power goes out and there are still people in the building during an emergency.
2. LED’s are more cost effective: The purchase price for LED emergency exit lights is about the same as incandescent and fluorescent exit lights, but that’s where the similarity ends.  When you consider that the exit lights are on 24 hours a day, the amount of electricity it takes to power the incandescent or fluorescent systems is many times the amount that LED’s will consume.  Over the span of a year, that could amount to hundreds of dollars in savings by using LED emergency exit lighting.
3. LED exit lights have a long shelf life: Once installed you can almost forget about your LED exit lighting system as they have a shelf life of over 10 years.  It’s a good idea to inspect your emergency exit lighting system as part of your routine lighting maintenance throughout the year to insure that the system continues to function properly.

At PKK Lighting in Madison, WI, we’ve been installing and maintaining emergency exit lighting systems for 50 years.  We’d be delighted to inspect your emergency exit lighting system and make recommendations to improve your system while saving you money. Contact us today.