Central battery systems are a critical element of safety lighting in high utilisation and mission critical applications. The removal of the need to service self-contained batteries, and centrally supply and circuit-monitor lighting adds significant operational and maintenance benefits to building operators.
The adoption of LED luminaires and the upgrading of battery technologies have opened the door to a new class of system offering extensions in rated battery life from four to 10-plus years, with reduced spatial requirement and lower FM and capital costs.
Prolojik has worked with numerous central battery systems in applications ranging from airports to hospitals, and from laboratories to critical infrastructure. The approach can be a fully centralised approach or a distributed central battery approach, but in all cases there are some fundamental operation outcomes which must be achieved.
- Ensure that lighting defaults to the necessary illuminance level in the event of emergency – overriding any local control.
- Instigate sectional emergency test activation of the central battery.
- Monitor luminaires during testing and generate performance status reports.
- Monitor feedback from the central battery to verify when on primary or secondary power and verify duration capacity.
- Testing and reporting to regional standards.
Any solution needs to also accommodate the demands of modern lighting control. Utilising DALI and DALI-2 is an efficient mechanism to both control and report luminaire performance during a test scenario. The demands of DALI are very different to that when applying IEC62386-202 for testing and monitoring DALI emergency inverters. In essence every light is now an emergency light and needs to be monitored and reported for normal operation during the autonomous test period, whether that is a monthly change-over test or an annual duration test.
Prolojik has developed a series of hardware and software solutions to accompany and enhance the central battery lighting operation. Products like the PL910 which provide a single device solution for:
- Phase switching up to 16A
- DALI phase monitoring
- Auxiliary test instigation circuit
- Ceramic terminals for battery circuit
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