Our smart home emergency lighting is designed to come on in specific locations in our home when the alarm goes off or when there is a mains power outage. The key objective is to provide clear directions to exit routes and lighting to assist with a rapid exit should this be required. All of the emergency lighting in our home is powered via our Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS), to ensure it works even if the mains power has failed.
We have designed our emergency lighting to be invisible when not in use and in most cases it is integrated into existing light fixtures. The emergency lighting is in addition to our safety lighting in our smart home and all of the other types of automated lighting.
Emergency lighting is typically very cheap and easy to install in a new build. In some types of building there may be legislation that requires it.
Emergency lighting is much more easily installed in a new build. Typically, it would all be one single logical lighting circuit but distributed around the home. We have used 12V dc power and a pair of 16/0.20mm 0.5mm² 11amp 'thinwall', automotive grade cables to connect it all up. Because the currents involved are so low, there is negligible voltage drop along very long lengths of wire.
Most of the actual lights are 5mm red LEDs using a super cheap and reliable LM317 current regulator IC (with a single resistor to set the current). For emergency lighting these LEDs are run at 15mA. This basically means we can ensure a fixed brightness regardless of any variations in the supply voltage.
This type of installation is super energy efficient and allows us to power it via our 12V Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS).
