ABB offers continuity of testing and record-keeping over a building’s lifetime, through central automatic testing of emergency lighting under the DALI protocol.
ABB will exhibit at LuxLive at London’s Excel on 14 and 15 November (stand N38) to showcase its integration solutions for the open-source DALI protocol for smart buildings. It will also display a wider portfolio of smart lighting and building automation solutions.
At the event ABB’s Paul Onyett, Global Product Manager for DALI Emergency Lighting, will deliver a presentation on Wednesday 14 November at 10:30am in the Escape Zone. He will explain why central automatic testing minimizes risk to building occupants by ensuring lifetime compliance with safety standards and Building Regulations, as well as delivering long-term savings for building owners.
By law, building owners must carry out regular testing of their emergency lighting systems and maintain accurate records of the health of their systems. This ensures that luminaires, power supplies and other components are ready to work at a moment’s notice – with the goal of guiding people out of the building should the worst happen.
Building owners can choose between manual, automatic self-testing or central automatic testing. While central automatic testing has a higher initial cost, it offers the key benefits of low operating costs, straightforward management and automatic central record keeping. Many building owners arrange management over five-year contracts, with the risk that manual records can be lost during the handover between contractors.
Opting for central automatic testing under the IEC 62034 standard minimises risk, ensures continuity of records and frees up time for building managers to focus on other tasks such as risk assessments. In addition, it supports Part L of the building regulations, which requires that emergency lighting systems should be selected to be effective for the lifetime of the building.
As the most trusted open protocol, DALI makes up 34 percent of the market for smart building lighting. It is used widely to control emergency lighting systems. In comparison, the KNX standard is the basis of many Building Management Systems (BMS). ABB has developed gateways to translate control signals between the two standards. These can integrate DALI emergency lighting control and testing into a KNX-based BMS.
Paul said: “Emergency systems have never been under such intense scrutiny. By installing ABB’s DALI user interface options such as the DALI Control Unit, a touch screen panel or KNX DALI Gateways for BMS systems, building owners can feel the benefits of central automatic testing. This includes confidence that buildings will pass annual safety tests and have a full set of safety records to comply with legislation. There are also added benefits of reduced lifetime maintenance costs of testing the emergency lighting in buildings. This ties in closely with lifetime lighting requirements for standard lighting in Part P of the Building Regulations”.
