Fire Exit Signs

What a fire exit sign has to do

A fire exit sign marks the escape route and stays readable when the mains supply fails. UK premises are covered by the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005, and BS 5266-1 sets out how escape lighting should be designed and maintained. The sign carries its own battery, so it lights the way out on the day the building loses power. We sell the fittings and the legends; the fire risk assessment for a given building is a job for a competent person.

Maintained or non-maintained

A maintained sign is lit all the time, on mains, and switches to battery when the supply drops. That is what you want where the public is present and the sign must be visible in normal use, so cinemas, bars, shops and function rooms. A non-maintained sign is dark until the power fails and then comes on. It suits offices, storerooms and back-of-house areas where staff know the building. Some of our models are switchable between the two on installation.

Running man legends and arrow direction

The running man pictogram is the ISO 7010 standard and does not need translating, which is why it has replaced worded signs. The arrow tells people which way to go, and it has to match the route rather than the fitting. Most of the boxes we stock ship with a set of legends so the same fitting can point left, right, up or down, and the legend slides in on site. Replacement legends are sold separately under our lighting accessories.

Surface, recessed and suspended

Surface boxes fix flat to a wall or ceiling and are the quickest to install. Recessed versions sit flush into a suspended ceiling or plasterboard, so only the legend blade shows, and they suit a finished interior where a box would read as clutter. Suspended and double-sided signs hang below the ceiling and are read from both approaches, which is what a long corridor or an open floor plate needs. Check the cut-out size before ordering a recessed fitting.

Self-test, and the inspection round it saves

Escape lighting needs a short functional test monthly and a full duration test annually, and the results go in the fire log book. A self-test sign runs those checks itself and shows a fault on an indicator, so instead of walking the site with a key you walk it looking for a red LED. On a building with dozens of signs that is the difference between an afternoon and ten minutes. Manual-test fittings are cheaper per unit and make sense on small sites.

Viewing distance and placement

How far away a sign can be read is set by the height of the pictogram. As a rule of thumb, a panel is legible at around one hundred times its legend height for an internally lit sign, so a 150mm legend reads at roughly 30 metres. Sign at every change of direction, at every final exit, and wherever the route is not obvious from where somebody is standing. Where the distance is longer than one sign can cover, add another rather than reaching for a bigger box.

What we stock

We hand-pick LED exit signs from trade lighting manufacturers, in maintained, non-maintained and self-test versions, with slim blade panels alongside heavier polycarbonate boxes for industrial and outdoor-rated positions. IP-rated versions are available where the fitting is going into a car park, a plant room or a loading bay. Sizes run from compact blades for a domestic-scale corridor up to the larger legends a warehouse aisle needs, and most fittings take a standard three-hour battery so the duration is consistent across a site. If you are specifying a whole building, our emergency lighting range covers the bulkheads and downlights that light the route itself, and the two are usually bought together. Anything we sell here is a finished fitting rather than a retrofit conversion kit.