Emergency Lighting: The Difference Between Maintained and Non-Maintained

Emergency lighting plays a large role in the safety of building occupants, staff and visitors in the event of an emergency. Even in a power failure, these safety measures are designed to illuminate, as they utilise batteries, to visually display the safest and fastest route out of the building.

There are two main types of emergency lighting products: maintained and non-maintained.

Want to know what emergency lighting is right for you? Interested in discovering different emergency lighting ideas?

Emergency Exit Sign Lighting GS-ES20

Emergency lighting explained

As we touched on at the start of this article, emergency lighting plays a crucial role in guiding people in a building to safety in the unfortunate event of an emergency.

If your building is a Class 5, 6, 7, 8 or 9, each storey of the building is required to have emergency and exit lighting properly.

Let’s recap the importance of emergency lighting products:

● They play a significant role in safety, and

● They’re required to be installed in many buildings throughout Australia.

Now let’s delve into the different types of emergency lighting products .

Maintained emergency lighting

There are two different types of emergency lighting: maintained and non-maintained.

Unswitched maintained emergency lighting products are:

● Continuously on, but

● Will dim to a lower-level light in the event of loss of power.

Switched maintained emergency lighting products:

● Can be switched on and off, but

● Will still illuminate (at a lower-level) in the event of loss of power.

Maintained emergency lighting products are generally utilised in movie theatres and auditoriums, shopping centres, hospitals and airplanes.

Non-maintained emergency lighting

As you can probably guess, non-maintained emergency lighting will only illuminate in the event of a loss of power. So, these emergency lighting products will come on only in emergency mode.

How does it work?

● The batteries inside continuously charge and a green LED shows that it is fully charged.

● If power fails, the fixture switches on using its battery back-up supply.

● At a minimum, non-maintained emergency lighting should last for a minimum of 3 hours.

Non-maintained emergency lighting products are not part of the general lighting fittings and fixtures of a building. Also, this type of emergency lighting is often found in workplaces that rely heavily on artificial lighting.

For all your LED emergency lighting products and accessories,  Godson Technology can help.