Emergency light works for testing but not when power is out.

[sfav8r]

So the owner of the store across from our shop says to me "hey, when the power went out on our block last week the emergency light didn't come on. What do you think the problem is?" I said it's likely the battery. So he replies that that if you press the test button it works fine. Sure enough it did. Since the test button just interrupts the power to the fixture, I'm having trouble wrapping my head around how it could fail in an outage. I thought perhaps he didn't see the fixture until a few hours after the power was out and maybe the battery died, but he said he was in the store when the power went out and it never came on.

Any thoughts?

 

[Cow]

I always verify what a customer says by seeing for myself. I can't count how many times I've went through different scenarios in my head just to show up on site and it's something totally different than I was expecting.

 

[electricalist]

As soon as someone tells me something like this and i see the test button work ,,I just have to find that circuit and turn it off.

 

[James L]

I've seen this before with a bad battery. It would only power the em. light for about 3-4 seconds.

he said the em. light never came on when the power went out...but was he looking at the light at the time of outage?


when I saw the same scenario, I held the test button longer, and sure enough it went out after about 4 seconds.