Critical lighting branch circuit Health Care

[david]

Patient exam rooms, patient bed rooms general care.

A single pole switch locally controlling the lights from the emergency circuit, is the switch considered under control of the nursing staff or should the switch be automatically bypassed to comply with the 10 second requirement of the light recovery on the critical (“emergency”) branch.

 

[dkidd]

Those lights are generally not going to be required egress lighting, and are allowed to be locally switched.

 

[roger]

To go along with dkidd's post, if an area is served by the Critical Branch and needs immediate illumination upon normal branch failure, a battery backed up fixture would be required, see 517.63.

Roger

 

[dkidd]

To go along with dkidd's post, if an area is served by the Critical Branch and needs immediate illumination upon normal branch failure, a battery backed up fixture would be required, see 517.63.

Roger

517.63 requires battery powered lighting units to be in anesthetizing areas, and permits them to be on the Critical branch. 2014

 

[roger]

and permits them to be on the Critical branch. 2014

Which is a smart installation if the facility does not want them on during the whole power outage.

Roger

 

[david]

Those lights are generally not going to be required egress lighting, and are allowed to be locally switched.

To go along with dkidd's post, if an area is served by the Critical Branch and needs immediate illumination upon normal branch failure, a battery backed up fixture would be required, see 517.63.

Roger

517.26 Application of Other Articles.
The essential electrical system shall meet the requirements of Article 700, except as amended by Article 517.

We / I agree that they are not on the Life Safety Branch We also believe in the application of local switching in patient rooms but where does article 517 get us to local switching we are under 2008 we realize article 517 and NFPA 99 are pulling away from classifying the Essential Electrical System as an "Emergency" Systems" Just looking for a code section that gets us there.

 

[david]

517.26 Application of Other Articles.
The essential electrical system shall meet the requirements of Article 700, except as amended by Article 517.

We / I agree that they are not on the Life Safety Branch We also believe in the application of local switching in patient rooms but where does article 517 get us to local switching we are under 2008 we realize article 517 and NFPA 99 are pulling away from classifying the Essential Electrical System as an "Emergency" Systems" Just looking for a code section that gets us there.

Never mind as I said we are under the 2008 NEC by reading 517.26 in the 2014 NEC it is clear that the Life Safety Branch is referenced back to article 700 under 2014 NEC.

So there really isn’t any clear guidance when to automatically by pass local switching on the Critical Branch in Hospitals. Perhaps better stated it's given over to the Hospital Administration to decide to by pass local switching on that branch.

 

[steve66]

Never mind as I said we are under the 2008 NEC by reading 517.26 in the 2014 NEC it is clear that the Life Safety Branch is referenced back to article 700 under 2014 NEC.

So there really isn’t any clear guidance when to automatically by pass local switching on the Critical Branch in Hospitals. Perhaps better stated it's given over to the Hospital Administration to decide to by pass local switching on that branch.

I would call it a design choice to bypass any local switching on the critical branch.

If we are still talking about patient rooms, hospitals don't typically evacuate patient rooms during a fire alarm, so emergency egress lighting is not typically required in each patient room.