Fire Exit Sign

If you are a landlord or rent out a building, employ staff or invite the public into your premises, you must display fire exit signs. A fire exit sign is green with white writing and contains a pictogram of a running man. While having the correct fire exit sign is important, the correct positioning of a fire exit sign is if equal importance. To help, the British Standards Institution has released BS 5499: Part 4: Code of Practice for Escape Route Signing, 2000. This comprises: System design, size and viewing distance, sign construction and suitability, Fire exit and escape route signs, other types of signs, maintenance of signs and the use of arrows concerning the direction of travel to escape. On the whole, a fire exit sign should provide clear, unambiguous instructions that guide escapees directly to a final fire exit. The wrong positioning of a fire exit sign can cause uncertainty and could even be life threatening. The shortest travel distance from various evacuation starting points to the escape route should be used as the preferred marked escape route. If at any point a choice of two escape routes of the same travel distance occurs, both routes should be illustrated by a separate succession of fire exit signs. The Code gives more details, clearly explaining the recommendations of locations, arrow directions, mounting heights and positions of your fire exit sign.

A fire exit sign points the building occupant or visitor to the nearest fire exit. Due to its essential nature, a fire exit sign must be understood whatever the readers language. The E.C. has recently brought in regulations asserting that safety signs should offer a common language of communication across E.C. states - pictograms are hence now employed on all fire exit signs enabling it to be understood by all languages. BS 5499: Part 1: 1990 demonstrates symbols which were recently accepted by the International Standards Organisation. The symbols used in these signs have undergone a transparency study in a range of countries and were considered the most comprehensible symbols so you can be sure that your fire exit sign or any other safety sign purchased complying with this code of practice is clear to all.