Emergency Lighting on External fire stairs for flats and offices

[lyledunn]

Where external fire stairs are provided in multi-tenanted buildings such as flats and offices it is a requirement to ensure that they are properly illuminated. Doing so can be difficult and invariably designers opt for maintained units connected to the landlord supply.
However, I also quite often see non-maintained units being used, each being connected to the individual tenants supply. This I believe seems to be incorrectly passing muster as I suspect inspectors are simply acknowledging the presence of an emergency luminaire without assessing the significant disadvantage present when the stairway is required to be lit from top to bottom in an emergency.
There is of course cons to the maintained method, not least of all annoyance to neighbours and energy consumption. Does any one recommend an alternative?
Regards,
lyle Dunn

[nearlythere]

Where external fire stairs are provided in multi-tenanted buildings such as flats and offices it is a requirement to ensure that they are properly illuminated. Doing so can be difficult and invariably designers opt for maintained units connected to the landlord supply.
However, I also quite often see non-maintained units being used, each being connected to the individual tenants supply. This I believe seems to be incorrectly passing muster as I suspect inspectors are simply acknowledging the presence of an emergency luminaire without assessing the significant disadvantage present when the stairway is required to be lit from top to bottom in an emergency.
There is of course cons to the maintained method, not least of all annoyance to neighbours and energy consumption. Does any one recommend an alternative?
Regards,
lyle Dunn

I quite often recommend changing to or making existing maintained units Lyle. I believe it is a simple process of connecting a link inside the unit. You again re-enforce my comments in another topic where emergency lighting, in the main, is usually not installed properly.
It would have been, and could well still be,  normal practice for IOs, except me, to accept the installation and test certificate on face value.