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Emergency Lighting Spacing Tables (and How To Make Them)

If the luminaires you produce or are considering using are to be applied as emergency luminaires you will
need to calculate the spacing table for emergency situations, along escape routes and in open anti-panic
areas.
PhotoView will calculate the data and table in a few seconds, and the table will be available as text in the
Windows clipboard, or you can save it as a file.

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All I had to do to get the data above is drag a photometry file (.IES, .LDT etc.) into PhotoView.
The image above shows quite a lot of data, let's zoom into the table itself:

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In the above example the following emergency lighting requirements have been met (except in the RED
cells):
The illumination at floor level must not be below 0.5 lux, except for a 0.5m margin around the area in
consideration.
The uniformity must be less than 40. (Emergency Uniformity is defined as Max/Min, confusingly.)
Given these conditions the program creates the table at the mounting heights shown. You can change the
mounting heights by clicking on one of the cells in the height column (to the left of the spacing table).
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The "Lux Below" column gives you the lux directly below the luminaire at the given height.
You can see the A and B spacing is along a corridor, and the program has given a B spacing of 10.5m, at
1.65m height (the first data row in the spacing table shown above). The uniformity for this luminaire is
more than 40 at 1.65 in a corridor and also in a room. Hence the two red cells.
The luminaire in the example above is clearly not designed for emergency spacing (the lux is far too high)
but it does illustrate how the program highlights problems by coloring cells red when the emergency
conditions are not met.
In the table below we can see a luminaire better suited for emergency situations. Only at a height of more
than 7 meters is the minimum lux condition not met, and at 5 meters height or less all the conditions for
corridors and rooms are met.

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Here is a clearer view of what the spacings mean in the tables:

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If you need a quick and simple introduction (or refresher!) to lighting terms and calculations try the book
"Candelas Lumens and Lux":

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Click here for details of discounts on PhotoView, the program which created the images on this page.
(c) 2014
About Owen Ransen
Contact me if you have any questions about this page or PhotoView photometric viewer. PhotoView is part of a set of services
and programs from OxyTech which can be bought with a 10% discount. Click here to find out more.

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