Lower Utility Bills

Joy_Burke

We have a company that operates 24/7 and we want to reduce our electricity expenses by lowering our power consumption. We saw a continuous monitoring and management solution online that can help keep track of the activities in the office including how our workforce operate when unsupervised, do you think it is a good idea to have specialists look out for the energy consumption and maintenance in our workplace? any thoughts?

Cardew

What 'malpractice' do you feel could be happening when workforce are unsupervised?

Joy_Burke

Cardew wrote: »

What 'malpractice' do you feel could be happening when workforce are unsupervised?

I can't say that there is malpractice going on, it's safe to say that we only want to remind our employees that somebody is watching them. In addition tot his, we are more concerned with promoting ways to reduce our energy consumption and continuous monitoring might just be the key to that.

System

Rather than take a stick approach to a problem that you are unlikely to solve without generating a lot of ill will, might I suggest a simple solution that worked in my organisation. On my way out to lunch and at the end of the day, I used to turn off all the lights in rooms that I passed where nobody was working. Very few ever got turned back on when people returned to their desks. As time passed, I found that my simple act had not gone un-noticed and others started doing the same thing. Also, a graph showing energy used over time, and in £s, was ridiculed at first but soon got a fair bit of attention.

robin58

When I was working for a major national company, they went on a energy saving push. They saved over £1 million in the first year on electricity alone!!

You need to look at the type of lighting you use and see if that can be changed to a lower consumption type. We used Energy saving lamps in all possible fittings.

Check to time clocks on all things like heating, ventilation, anything that has a clock which turns equipment on/off. Change the settings to the seasons, eg not letting the heating come on earlier than needed, e.g. warm days, cooler evenings.

This might not seem much but I worked at a site where we had 2 timers which turned on and off in 10 minute sections. One was on the heating, the other ventilation. I worked out over a year of normal operations it was an extra cost of 5 days extra energy consumption per timer , when comparing to a timer which turns on off in 1 minute intervals.

Personally I would get your workforce involved in ways they could cut down the energy bill and reward them in some way. That would be more productive than the Big Brother approach, which will if not done right breed a contempt of the company which could lead to a very bad workplace.