Why Is My Emergency Exit Light Flashing?

Byron Knight, Licensed Electrical Contractor

QLD Lic. 1511406 · 20+ years’ experience · Gold Coast & SEQ · Updated November 2026

Somebody in your building has noticed a little light blinking away on an exit sign and asked whether it matters. It does, but probably not for the reason they think. The fitting isn’t broken in the sense of not working. It’s telling you it already tested itself and something failed, or that it hasn’t been able to complete a test.

Many modern emergency fittings run their own discharge tests on a timer and report the result through that indicator. The flash is a diagnostic code. Read from the floor, it tells you what failed before anyone gets a ladder out.

The flash is a code, not an alarm

The codes are set by the manufacturer, not by the standard, and that trips people up. Two fittings that look identical on the ceiling can use completely different colours and rhythms for the same fault. So a generic search for “flashing red light on exit sign” will give you a confident answer that may be wrong for the fitting in front of you.

To show what a real code set looks like, these are the indications published by Clevertronics for their Clevertest Plus system. They apply to that system only:

The “no test result” row is the one worth pausing on. A fitting reporting that isn’t telling you it failed. It’s telling you nobody knows either way, which for compliance purposes is the same problem.

If your fittings are a different brand, the pattern list will be different. The manufacturer’s guide for your system, often kept with the building’s fire safety records, is where the real answer lives. Don’t open a fitting to look for a label. Whichever brand it is, treat any fault indication as a fitting that may not work when it is needed.

What’s usually failing

The usual suspects, starting with the most likely:

1. The battery. It is the part that wears out. It can hold enough charge to look fine on the ceiling and not enough to run for its full rated duration when it counts.
2. The charging circuit or control gear. The battery never gets brought back up properly, so it fails the next test regardless of its age.
3. The lamp or LED. Less common in LED fittings, but it still happens, and in an exit sign it can be the difference between a legible running man and a dim smudge.
4. The self-test itself. On networked systems, a fitting that has dropped off the system can report as untested instead of failed.
5. Age. Fittings have a design life. Past it, you’re replacing components on something that may be due for replacement as a whole.

Why batteries die faster in some buildings than others

Heat is the main variable, and it explains why two buildings on the same street can get very different service lives out of the same fitting.

Clevertronics publishes expected life by chemistry: 4 years or more for nickel cadmium and nickel metal hydride, 6 or more for its economy lithium iron phosphate, and 8 or more for its premium version, all based on a 30 degree ambient temperature. It’s blunt about temperature on central battery systems too: at 30 degrees a battery might only last 5 years, and at 35 degrees or more it might only last 2 to 3.

Now think about where emergency fittings actually live in a Gold Coast building. Carparks with poor cross-ventilation. Plant rooms. Stairwells that bake all afternoon on a western wall. Roof spaces. Those are the fittings likely to come up flashing first, and it isn’t a defect: it’s the heat shortening the battery’s life.

It’s the same reason to check carpark lighting as its own zone instead of assuming a building-wide average.

What Queensland actually requires you to do about it

The duty sits with the building occupier under the Fire Services Act 1990 and the Building Fire Safety Regulation 2008. The Queensland Fire Department is direct about it: being an occupier carries “the important legal responsibility of ensuring the safety of anyone in the building”, and the occupier must make sure fire safety installations meet Queensland Development Code Mandatory Part (MP) 6.1.

MP 6.1 is the part most people have never opened. It covers the commissioning and maintenance of fire safety installations, including emergency lighting. Business Queensland’s guide to fire safety installations says maintenance records are kept for 2 years with the building’s fire safety management plan, and that the occupier must provide a yearly occupier’s statement to the Queensland Fire Department.

The testing schedule itself, and what the discharge test actually catches, is set out in how often emergency lighting needs testing in QLD. For this article the relevant part is simpler: a flashing fault is a finding. It goes in the logbook, it gets fixed, and the fix goes in the logbook too.

That last one is an electrical fault, not a maintenance item. Don’t touch the fitting or try to open it. Keep people clear and call our 24/7 commercial emergency electrician line straight away, and if there is smoke or flame, get everyone out and call 000.

The Queensland Fire Department’s enforcement options run from notices and requisitions by the Commissioner through infringement notices to prosecution. The likelier route to the top of that ladder is not one flashing fitting. It is a logbook that shows nothing was ever done.

Whose problem is it: occupier, owner or body corporate?

This is where a lot of buildings lose a month arguing while the fitting keeps blinking.

In a single-occupancy commercial building, the occupier carries the duty, and the lease decides who pays. In a body corporate building, emergency and exit lighting on common property (the corridors, stairwells, lobbies and carparks) generally sits with the body corporate. Lighting inside a lot is generally the lot owner’s. That boundary is set out properly in body corporate versus unit owner electrical responsibilities, and it’s the same line we work to as strata and body corporate electricians.

Retail and office tenancies are the messy case. The fitting is physically in the tenancy, the evacuation route it serves belongs to the building, and the lease often says something vague. Read the lease before the next cycle and not during an audit, because the occupier statement doesn’t care whose budget it was.

If the building is being fitted out or reconfigured, the layout of the escape route changes and so does the emergency lighting design. That’s a design question, not a maintenance one, and it’s covered in commercial fit-out electrical work.

What’s different about Gold Coast buildings

Two things, and they compound. Heat, as above, in carparks and plant rooms that were never designed with battery life in mind. And salt, which works on connections and fitting hardware in anything close to the water, so a fitting in a Surfers Paradise or Broadbeach tower can be ageing on two fronts at once.

The practical upshot for a strata manager: don’t budget emergency lighting as a flat per-fitting line across a portfolio. A hot coastal carpark is likely to need replacements at a different rate to an air-conditioned office park in Robina, and the hot buildings are the ones most likely to surprise people at audit. A preventative maintenance programme on a fixed price plan mostly exists so these costs stop arriving as surprises.