How to reduce energy usage

If you’re looking to reduce your business’s energy usage, the first and most important step that many companies forget about is to find out how much energy you’re actually using. Calculating your energy usage allows you to see a rough average of how much energy you use in a month – or you can calculate it for other periods of time depending on what’s most useful for your business. For example, if your company is very seasonal, then it may be more helpful to look at an annual average to account for fluctuations in energy use. 

Once you’ve established how much energy your business actually uses, you can get a rough idea of how much you need or would like to reduce that figure by, which gives you something to aim for when making changes within the company.

Below, we look at a variety of business changes that could help you to save money on your energy bills.

How to reduce energy costs in business

The less energy you use, the lower your bills will be – and it’s also better for the environment. Whatever your motivations are, reducing your energy usage can be very beneficial for business. Not all techniques will work well for all types of businesses, so it’s a good idea to pick and choose which methods are achievable and suitable for you. Remember, you can always start small at first and work your way up to bigger changes.

Consider working locations

If your business works out of office space or a similar set-up, then the majority of your energy costs will come from powering equipment, keeping your employees comfortable and providing the necessary facilities all workplaces should have. Therefore, it’s worth considering whether it would be feasible to introduce a work from home (WFH) policy. 

Value that in-office feeling? Instead of going fully WFH, think about a hybrid arrangement, where your employees work from home on some days and the office on others. If you have everyone in on certain days and the office empty on others, that would allow you to save considerably on lighting and heating or air conditioning on those days when nobody is at the office. Even if you have it staggered so that there’s always a group of employees at the office, you’d still make savings on appliance usage, and you may even be able to switch to a smaller office which would be less expensive and easier to heat or cool. 

Switch things off when not in use

Many businesses lose money through simple inefficiencies – and energy inefficiency is no exception. One simple thing that can make a big difference is to switch off appliances when they’re not in use – whether it’s your employees’ individual devices or communal items such as printers or kitchenware.

It sounds easy enough to do, but if you have a lot of appliances to account for, it becomes a bigger task to go around every night making sure they’re all switched off. For this reason, it could be a good idea to get your employees involved and create a ‘closing’ checklist to make sure everything that can be safely turned off is. 

This concept doesn’t just apply to appliances, but also to other culprits for energy usage – namely your lighting and your heating. Installing motion-sensor lighting can be a great way to save energy without anyone having to change their behaviour, which can be particularly useful if your team has got into bad habits. 

As for your heating and cooling systems, making sure that they’re not running when nobody’s in the office is a good way to cut a hefty chunk out of your energy costs. Just remember that you’ll need to keep your heating on standby while you’re not around in the winter months. This means it’ll heat your building just enough to prevent the pipes from freezing, which would entail a far costlier repair job than the running costs of having your heating on low. 

Check your hardware

Another excellent way to reduce costs without anyone having to change their habits is to make sure all of your appliances are energy efficient. Calculating the energy cost of a given appliance is simple, and doing so can open your eyes to huge potential savings in the long term.

For example, imagine that you currently have a 600W fridge at your workplace. To run it for 365 days with an energy cost of 30 pence per kilowatt-hour (kWh) would cost you £1,576.80. Meanwhile, a 500W fridge would cost £1,314 per year on the same rate. 

Making that switch would save you over £250 per year, and that’s just a single appliance. Scale this up across your whole business and you could be looking at considerable savings. This is particularly true for situations where you have multiples of a given appliance – for example, employee laptops and monitors. Even if you only make a £10 saving per year by upgrading a laptop, for example, multiply that by 50 employees and you would actually save £500 a year!

There are lots of ways you can make changes to reduce your energy costs and usage as a business, and many apply to the home as well. Of course, reducing your energy usage is only one way to get your business energy bills down. You might also benefit from researching deals for business electricity and gas to see if you could pay a smaller fee per unit of energy. Why not get started today and see how much you could save?