Emergency and Exit Light Testing in Melbourne - What AS 2293 Actually Requires

Walk through any Melbourne shop, office, clinic or apartment common area and the green running-man signs are so familiar they're invisible. Legally, they're anything but: emergency and exit lighting is an essential safety measure under Victoria's Building Regulations 2018, and it carries a standing maintenance obligation that a surprising number of building owners, owners corporations and tenants assume someone else is handling. We test and maintain these systems across Melbourne as part of our commercial electrical work - here's what the obligation actually is, in plain terms.

Who's responsible - and what Victoria expects

Responsibility sits with the building owner - in a strata building, the owners corporation for common areas - not with whoever happens to notice a dead sign. Emergency and exit lighting is listed among a building's essential safety measures, which the owner must maintain and report on through the annual essential safety measures report that building surveyors, insurers and fire authorities expect to see. In practice the gap happens at handover: a tenancy fit-out gets commissioned with everything working, and then nobody books the recurring testing. The obligation doesn't lapse because the building is new or the lights look fine - battery-backed fittings degrade quietly, and the whole point of the test regime is to catch that before a real outage does.

The six-monthly test, in plain terms

The maintenance standard behind the regulation is AS/NZS 2293, and its core requirement is simple to state: every six months, each emergency luminaire and exit sign must pass a discharge test - mains supply to the fittings is switched off, and every fitting has to keep running on its own battery for 90 minutes. Fittings must then recharge within 24 hours. Between discharge tests, the standard expects regular visual checks, and every test and repair is recorded in a logbook kept with the building's records - that logbook is what your surveyor or insurer asks for, and an empty one reads the same as no testing at all.

• →A full discharge test of every emergency fitting and exit sign - not a sample - run for the full 90 minutes
• →Each fitting individually recorded in the logbook: location, result, and any repair made
• →Failed batteries and fittings replaced, ideally on the same visit so the building is never left waiting compliant-on-paper
• →Exit path coverage checked - partitions and refits move exit routes, and the lighting has to follow them
• →Documentation left ready for the annual essential safety measures report, not reconstructed at report time

Why fittings fail the 90 minutes

Almost every failure we find comes down to one of four things. Batteries age - a few years of float charging is a hard life, and a fitting that lights up when you flick the test switch can still die twenty minutes into a real discharge, which is exactly why the standard demands the full 90. Fit-outs and repaints bury or remove fittings without anyone updating the layout. Partition changes move the exit paths away from the lighting that was designed for them. And LED refits done on price sometimes swap emergency-rated fittings for standard ones that look identical with the power on. All four are invisible until the test - or the blackout.

Fitting out? The cheap time to get this right is now

If you're planning a tenancy fit-out, emergency lighting is one of the items that stalls occupancy when it's treated as an afterthought - commissioning and documentation are part of the certification your building surveyor signs off on. Designing the emergency lighting around the real exit paths, commissioning it properly and handing over a live logbook is part of every commercial fit outs project we deliver, and the six-monthly cycle can simply continue from there as part of commercial maintenance. One system, one logbook, no gap between the fit-out and the obligation that follows it.

If you own a building, sit on an owners corporation committee, or manage a site and can't point to the current emergency lighting logbook, that's the signal to act - before the report is due, not after. We'll quote the testing cycle fixed-price through contact us. Licensed A-Grade electricians, REC 37142, working across metropolitan Melbourne.