Why Is My Emergency Exit Light Flashing?

Byron Knight, Licensed Electrical Contractor

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

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 it properly and you know what failed before anyone gets a ladder out.

The flash is a code, not an alarm

Here’s the thing that trips people up: the codes are set by the manufacturer, not by the standard. 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:

That last row is the one worth pausing on. A fitting reporting “no test completed” 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 label inside the fitting or the system quick guide in the switchboard cupboard is where the real answer lives.

What’s usually failing

In roughly the order I find them:

1. The battery. By a distance the most common. It holds enough charge to look fine on the ceiling and not enough to run 90 minutes 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, 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 reports as untested rather than failed.
5. Age. Fittings have a design life. Past it, you’re replacing components on something the manufacturer no longer stands behind.

Why batteries die faster in some buildings than others

Heat is the variable that matters, and it explains why two buildings on the same street 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 economy lithium iron phosphate, 8 or more for their premium version, all rated at 30 degrees ambient. They’re blunt about temperature on central battery systems too: at 30 degrees a battery might last five years, at 35 or more it might only manage two or three.

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 that come up flashing first, and it isn’t a defect, it’s the ambient temperature quietly halving the battery’s life.

It’s the same reason I’d check carpark lighting as its own zone rather than 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: the occupier carries the legal responsibility for the safety of anyone in the building in a fire, and must ensure fire safety installations meet Queensland Development Code Mandatory Part 6.1.

MP 6.1 is the part most people have never opened. It requires emergency lighting to be maintained so that it complies with AS/NZS 2293.2, that maintenance records be kept for two years with the building’s fire safety management plan, and that the occupier completes a statement within a year of taking up occupation and yearly after that.

The testing schedule itself, what happens on a six monthly cycle and what the discharge test actually catches, I’ve set out in full 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 rectified, and the rectification goes in the logbook too.

Queensland Fire Department escalation runs from notices and requisitions through infringement notices to prosecution. Nobody arrives at the top of that ladder over one flashing fitting. They arrive there over 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, sits with the body corporate. Lighting inside a lot is generally the lot owner’s. I’ve set that boundary out properly in body corporate versus unit owner electrical responsibilities, and it’s the same line I work to as a strata and body corporate electrician.

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 usually says something vague. My advice is to read the lease before the next cycle rather than 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 terminations and fitting hardware in anything close to the water, so a fitting in a Surfers Paradise or Broadbeach tower is 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. The coastal high-rise carpark will eat replacements at a different rate to the office park at Robina, and the buildings that surprise people at audit are almost always the hot ones. A preventative maintenance programme on a fixed price plan mostly exists so that the surprise stops being a surprise.

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