Key takeaways
- House panels feed everything the residents share, and their directories are often the least accurate in the building.
- Corridor, stair and exit lighting is a life safety system, and NFPA 101 sets a monthly 30 second test and an annual 90 minute test for battery units.
- Site lighting, gates and pool equipment are outdoors, exposed and on timers, which is why they fail more than anything indoors.
- Written records of tests and repairs protect the owner at an inspection, an insurance claim or a sale.
Multifamily common area electrical covers every system in an apartment or condo community that no single resident owns: the house panels, the corridor and stairwell lights, the exit signs and emergency lights, the parking lot and walkway lighting, the gates, the leasing office, the laundry, the pool and the amenity spaces. Residents notice these systems only when they fail, and when they fail at night, in a stairwell, they become a safety problem and a liability problem at once.
This guide is for property managers and owners in the San Antonio area who want to know what those systems are, how they fail, and what a good electrical contractor should be documenting for them.
House panels and what they feed
Every unit in a multifamily building has its own meter and panel. The shared systems are fed separately, from what are usually called house panels or common area panels, metered to the property rather than a tenant. A larger community may have one at every building, plus panels for the leasing office, the clubhouse, the pool equipment and the site lighting.
House panels have a particular problem: over the years, circuits get added for a vending machine, a security camera, a gate operator or a holiday lighting display, and the directory never gets updated. When something fails, the maintenance tech is flipping breakers to find it. The first useful thing an electrician can do at most properties is trace each house panel, correct the directory, and confirm there is clear working space in front of it. NEC 110.26 requires that space, and storage closets around house panels tend to fill up with paint cans and spare blinds.
Corridor and stairwell lighting
Interior breezeways, corridors and stairwells are lit around the clock in many buildings, or on photocells and timers in open air designs common in Texas. They are often the oldest fixtures on the property, and many communities still have fluorescent or even incandescent fixtures in stairwells. When lamps fail one at a time, a stairwell goes from bright to dim to dark over a few months, and nobody files a work order until someone falls.
Converting common area lighting to LED cuts the energy bill on fixtures that run many hours a day, and it cuts the number of lamp change calls. Our LED lighting retrofit service covers how we plan those conversions so the light levels in stairs and walkways stay where they should be.
Exit signs and emergency lighting
Exit signs and emergency lights are a life safety system. Where they are required, they have to light the path out of the building when normal power fails. In most multifamily properties these are self contained units with a battery inside each fixture, and batteries wear out whether or not anyone tests them.
NFPA 101, the Life Safety Code, sets the testing schedule for battery powered emergency lighting: a functional test of at least 30 seconds every month, and a full test of 90 minutes once a year, with written records of both. The fire marshal can ask to see those records. A unit can pass every monthly test and still fail to last the full 90 minutes, which is why the annual test exists.
- Monthly: press the test button on each unit, confirm the lamps come on for at least 30 seconds, and log it.
- Yearly: run each unit on battery for the full 90 minutes, and log the units that fail.
- Replace failed batteries or failed units promptly, and log the repair.
- Keep the log where it can be shown at an inspection.
We cover the testing rules in more detail on our emergency lighting and exit sign page. A property that wants the tests done and logged for it can put them in a maintenance agreement.
Parking lots, walkways and gates
Site lighting is the common area system residents see first and complain about most. Pole lights, wall packs on the buildings, walkway bollards and entry signs are all outdoors, on photocells or timers, and fed by underground circuits that run across the whole property. Lightning, irrigation water, grounds crews and vehicles all take a toll.
When a row of poles goes dark at once, the problem is usually in the control or the underground circuit, not the fixtures. We walk through how those faults are found in our guide to parking lot lighting repair.
Gate operators, call boxes and access control panels are also usually on house circuits. When a gate fails open, the property loses its security. When it fails closed, residents cannot get in. A dedicated circuit with surge protection at the operator prevents a lot of those calls, because gate electronics are among the first things a nearby lightning strike damages.
Our surge protection service explains how protection at the panel and at the equipment work together.
Pools and amenity spaces
Community pools carry some of the strictest rules in the electrical code. NEC Article 680 covers the pump motors, the underwater and deck lighting, the bonding of the pool structure and nearby metal, and the GFCI protection for receptacles and equipment around the water. Pool equipment rooms are also hot, damp and full of chemicals, which corrodes connections and breakers.
If residents report a tingle in the water or at a handrail, close the pool and call an electrician the same day. That is a sign of a bonding or grounding problem, and it is not something to wait on. Fitness rooms, clubhouses and laundry rooms add their own loads, and laundry rooms in particular often need dedicated circuits for commercial washers and dryers.
Leasing offices, laundry and resident EV charging
The leasing office is a small commercial space inside a residential property, with its own computers, phones, network equipment and often a model unit. Laundry rooms carry commercial washers and dryers, and dryers in particular draw heavy loads on dedicated circuits. Both tend to grow over time without anyone checking whether the house panel feeding them has room.
More residents are also asking for EV charging. Adding chargers to a parking area starts with what the house service can carry, then with where the chargers go, how they are metered or billed, and how the circuits reach the parking spaces. Planning a few spaces well, with room to add more later, usually costs less than adding chargers one at a time as residents ask.
Our EV and fleet charging page covers how we run the load study before any charger is chosen.
Document everything
The best thing a property manager can get from an electrical contractor, after the repair itself, is a record. Which panel, which circuit, what was wrong, what was done and when. That record matters at a fire inspection, when an insurance adjuster asks about a loss, when a new manager takes over the property, and when the property is sold and the buyer's inspector walks the common areas.
At Wattsmith we label what we touch, give a written price before the work is done, and leave a work order that says what was found and what was fixed. For larger communities, a single point of contact and scheduled visits keep the common areas from becoming a list of small failures nobody owns.
The same approach applies when a property is renovated, which can bring a permit and a new set of inspections. Read about that in change of occupancy electrical, and see the rest of our commercial electrical services for property managers.