Top tips for reducing your business energy bill

Thursday 12 January, 2012

By Helen - helen@consumerchoices.co.uk

Energy efficiencies to save your business hundreds, or even thousands, of pounds a year.

According to the Carbon Trust, small and medium-sized office-based businesses waste nearly £350 a year by leaving computers, screens and other hardware on standby - even when they are switched off at weekends or during holidays.

Without a single pound of capital investment, your business could reduce its heating and lighting electricity bills by 10%. By shopping around for the best deal offered by energy suppliers, you could save money and barely lift more than your mouse clicking finger. Use our business postcode checker to compare deals in your area.

Add a little investment to the equation and the savings start mounting up, more than covering your investment, often in a short space of time.

Following our top tips should help you to reduce your business energy bills by improving the way you choose, use and maintain your:

• Office equipment
• Heating
• Lighting

Office equipment

Create an energy-efficient mindset among your staff. Entrenching a “switch-off before you head off” culture - where staff turn off equipment whenever practical to do so - can save your business hundreds of pounds a year.

Most modern office equipment has built-in power save settings that you can set to your own specifications. Setting computers in use continually to shut down after a minute of inactivity may be quite impractical, and will certainly prove irritating to your staff. Plus, the time wasted by staff having to log back on constantly will negate any energy savings you make.

However, for equipment that is used less regularly, such as printers, meeting room screens and computers, photocopiers and fax machines, adjusting power save settings or even switching them off between use, could provide you with energy savings of up to 70% when coupled with switching off appliances out of hours.

Heating

It is estimated that every 1°C increase in temperature results in an 8% rise in your business energy costs - a fact that may help focus your mind if you are fond of an office environment that resembles the tropics.

Conversely, this isn’t an opportunity to justify setting the thermostat to sub-arctic conditions. Having your office temperature lower than 16 degrees is considered bad practice and won’t earn you any fans among your staff.

It is not just the temperature that affects your heating bill though.

We’ve all worked in offices where some staff are cranking up the heating while the other half have got the air-con pumping on full blast and are dramatically fanning themselves with a copy of the latest industry publication. The result? Super-high energy bills and yet still no-one is comfortable. The same goes for leaving windows open while you are trying to heat or cool your office. At best it is utterly ineffective.

Thermostats need to be placed away from draughts
Photo by larsjuh
• Ensure your thermostat is located in an area away from draughts or heating sources and is set to a reasonable temperature - 19-21 degrees is considered comfortable.
• If your heating and cooling systems are set to come on automatically, make sure they match the times when people are in the office.
• Don’t block radiators with furniture, it reduces their efficiency.
• Fit draught excluders to doors and windows.
• Installing heating controls can mean an initial outlay, but can bring longer-term savings, paying back the investment within a couple of years. Optimum start/stop controls can bring a 10% improvement in your heating efficiency by intelligently minimising the number of hours a boiler is operating. Weather compensation controls allow you to save energy by factoring external temperature increases to reduce boiler output, preventing overheating and minimising heat loss from pipework.

Lighting

• Use energy-efficient bulbs.

Dirty windows block free, natural light from your office
Photo by --Sam--
• If you are peering out through grimy windows to see if it’s day or night outside, investing in occasional visits from a window cleaner can allow you to use natural, rather than artificial, light for more of the year. Ditto the effect of running a duster over your light fittings once in a while.
• By installing lighting controls you could save up to 30% on your lighting bills. Occupancy sensors are ideal for areas of limited use - like meeting rooms and bathrooms - as they switch off lights when a space isn’t being used. Sensors pick up movement and turn the lights back on when the room is in use.
• You could also install light sensors that work in a similar way to street lighting by switching on, or getting brighter, when the natural light falls below a certain level.
• Switch all unnecessary lights off when you leave, your business doesn’t gain anything by being lit up like a Christmas tree all night.

The financial benefits of energy efficiency

Aside from purely cutting your energy bill, there are other ways you can improve your business’ bottom line when it comes to energy saving.

The Carbon Trust Enhanced Capital Allowances (ECA) scheme allows businesses to write-off the entire cost of listed energy-saving equipment against taxable profits in the year of purchase.

So if you need more than the environmental angle to persuade you to make your business more energy efficient, how about a big cash saving?

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