Let’s all agree that one of the most feared utility bills by any business is the electricity bill, especially if running a vast enterprise. Once you receive your bill, you keep on wondering what happened to make that bill so high. If you are not keen on your energy bills, you might be paying a considerable amount, the same as that of your rent. From the research, lighting takes almost 17% of energy costs, with cooling, space heating, and ventilation taking a combined figure of almost 30%. That’s too high when they don’t add to any business margins.
How do you lower the utility costs? There are many ways companies can use them to lower utility bills. These ways involve seeking natural ways of cutting down energy use and using other alternative ways that use less energy. Here are some proven ways you can use to lower your utility bills.
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Do an Energy Efficiency Audit
It is crucial to do an energy audit for your business to know the areas with the highest consumption. This step should be your first if you want to lower your electricity consumption. With this energy efficiency audit, you look deeply into your business energy costs, find the areas where you are using a lot of power and find ways of cutting it down. With a good audit, you will spot air leaks, unnecessary wastage, insulation issues, and other problems that will help find the solution. From here, you can then come up with effective ways, including a more efficient technology that will cut down your power bills.
Change Office Behaviors
Lowering your utility bills should start with the individuals who use these utilities. Therefore, you need to sit down with your staff and anyone concerned with running your business to find ways of saving money on your electric bill. The small changes you make with your staff can go a long way in reducing your energy and water bills drastically.
Therefore, you have to encourage your team to be more efficient when using these essentials and be wary of their related costs. Some of the behaviors your team can adapt are taking the stairs instead of the lifts, closing doors to conserve heat, using less light, and creating flexible working hours. Others include working from home, having a comfortable working dress that won’t require heating or cooling, and asking your employees to brainstorm various ways to conserve these utilities.
Do an After-Hours Audit
You don’t have to hire a professional to do an after-hours audit. You can do it yourself or with your staff to reduce energy and water consumption in your company. How is this done? Mostly, some employees will leave the premises without turning the machines and the lights off. Others will leave the taps running and so on. This situation will mean incurring higher utility bills when not in the office.
With an after-hours audit, you will discover the computers and other devices that stay on, and you can quickly put measures to ensure that such doesn’t happen again. After putting such measures, you can do impromptu checkups to see who is not following the rules and advise them to do so or put repercussions of not doing so.
Switch to the Cloud
How does switching to the cloud enable you to lower utility bills? With a local server, you’ll be having computers and servers running throughout to manage your business processes. There will also be cooling devices to cool off the appliances installed in the server room. There will always be a continuous use of power to keep the server room running with this situation.
To prevent this and to cut down energy costs, you can consider switching to cloud storage, which puts off the server room. It is also one way of going paperless, where companies can reduce more than just energy bills. Furthermore, going paperless enables the company to save on trees and water to protect the environment.
Invest in Energy-Efficient Technology
Has your business invested in energy-efficient technology? If not, you need to do so soon to cut down your utility bills. While energy-efficient technologies cost higher than regular appliances, it enables you to save on costs in the long run since your energy bills will reduce drastically.
Some of the technologies you need to try are power-saver mode appliances, ENERGY STAR-rated appliances, Power strips, laptops instead of desktops, LED light bulbs, reprogrammable thermostats, and others more for your business.
Lowering your utility bills involves changing some ways and mindsets on how people are using these utilities. Therefore, it is essential to train your staff and adopt energy-efficient appliances, as highlighted above, to cut your energy costs. Some things don’t require spending money, but change how you do things to cut on costs.
