FAQ: Battery Life in Emergency Light Fittings

If those chemicals aren’t regularly tested and maintained, they become stagnant and aren’t as effective when called upon to react.

Importance of Battery Maintenance

Emergency lighting containing batteries is not a new innovation, however, a light’s ability to maintain the battery is. 

Battery maintenance, along with appropriate commissioning, prolongs a battery’s life and ensures that it’s in top form when called upon to do it’s job. Few people are aware that on commissioning battery backup units should be cycled to get them working properly. Cycling a battery involves charging the battery to 100% capacity and then discharging the battery over a 24 hour period. When done this is a single cycle. To get batteries in to top condition, they need to be cycled three times.  In practice, this rarely happens on an operational site, particularly in retrofit applications either because it takes too long or because the maintenance manager isn’t aware of the rigors of battery cycling. This means that there are a lot of emergency lights on site that aren’t going to be able to perform when they need to.

The Raytec  Spartan intelligent emergency luminaires are designed to eliminate this problem. They automatically initiate the commissioning sequence on the first start and then monitor battery life to ensure optimum battery performance at all times. They provide a self-testing function that automatically cycles the battery to ensure its health and measures its capacity. A tri-colored signal LED indicates the status of the battery, enabling easy maintenance checks from ground level.

With the self-commissioning, self-testing, and self-healing functions of the Raytec unit we estimate the average battery life of 4 years in extreme Australian conditions.