With office parties to organize and gifts to send to employees, customers and customers, things can become hectic for businesses during the holidays, as well as expensive. With a little effort and know-how, a company can reduce its expenses and save electricity.
If you are interested in reducing this unavoidable business expense during the holiday season, take a look at the following ways to save electricity during this time of year. Busy year.
Create an Energy Checklist
One of the first things you should do to try to help your business consume less electricity during this festive time is to create an energy checklist. This checklist should cover all the elements of your company's energy consumption.
Among the key elements of your energy checklist include heating, lighting, air currents and ventilation, equipment, gas and electricity. When you create an energy checklist before the holiday season, you should visit every room in your business, adding everything related to your energy consumption so you can effectively winterize your business.
Use feeding strips to feed holiday decorations
Holiday lights and neon decorations bring joy into a business space. However, these items undermine the energy can also add dollars to energy bills! Even when the lights and the electronics are not turned on, they are pulling energy, which costs money to businesses. Help us reduce this expense by plugging Christmas decorations onto a power bar and turning it off when not in use.
Opt for the LED lights
As the Ministry of Energy notes, LED bulbs consume 70 percent of the energy consumed. 100 less energy than conventional incandescent bulbs. Therefore, lighting a tree in the office for 12 hours a day for 40 days would cost $ 0.27 compared to the $ 10 it would take to light the same tree with incandescent light bulbs. It's a no-brainer!
Use rechargeable batteries
Rather than connecting party decorations to the power grid, use battery-powered decorations instead. Rechargeable batteries are proving more cost effective than conventional batteries and mean you do not rely on electricity.
Keep the heat in your building
With skittish weather around the holiday season, heating must often run at full speed to keep everyone warm at work. Simply caulk your premises so that doors and windows do not let in cold air and that warm air does not help you to make sure your heating system has less work to do. And less work for your heating system means less money to pay on energy bills!
Let there be light
True, sunshine hours are less during the holiday season, but that does not mean that there is no sun during working hours in December. Instead of just letting the lights on all day long, try to get the optimal amount of natural light flooding in the office, store, factory or any other facility business that you operate.
This could mean opening the blinds to their full capacity, ensuring that the curtains are completely drawn, or removing the objects and clutter from the window sills that can prevent natural light from getting through the Windows.
Waterproof your windows
And speaking of windows, they can be responsible for up to 10% of the heat loss in a typical building, according to Green Spec. Think of "winterizing" to reduce heat loss and thus make sure that money for heating bills does not go away – literally in the air!
You may want to consider installing more energy-efficient windows. Or you can reduce energy costs by improving their efficiency. This can be done by adding storm windows, caulking and weather stripping, advises the Ministry of Energy.
Installing a programmable thermostat
The warm air circulating in the office is wasted if no one is there at that time. Make sure your business does not waste money on heating vacant buildings or rooms that are not used. You can do this by installing a programmable thermostat in your building. According to the Ministry of Energy, up to 10 percent can be saved each year on heating and cooling costs by simply turning a thermostat 7 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit for eight hours a day.
Programmable thermostats allow businesses to better control their heating. You can essentially adjust the hours on the thermostat, so that it turns on and off at specific times of the day using a predefined schedule. This means that a building is not unnecessarily heated when no one is occupying it, which allows businesses to save considerably on energy bills.
Treat your business for an energy audit
Now is the time to do an energy audit of your business to ensure you save money on electricity and gas in time for the holiday season. A comprehensive energy audit will educate the company on energy, identify where energy is going to get lost and set up a plan to save energy. Conducting an energy audit at your business premises is one of the most cost-effective ways to help consistently reduce monthly gas and electricity expenses.
Think Wisely about Vacation Gadgets
As Energy Saving Trust explains, tablets consume 70% less energy than laptops. If you have a Bring your own device to work policy, encourage staff to use tablets rather than laptops that consume a lot of energy. Or you can even think of providing your staff with energy efficient tablets to dramatically reduce electricity costs during the holidays.
Install a timer for Christmas lights
Holiday lights that sparkle on a tree without anyone to enjoy them are a total loss of money! The installation of a timer in the office or in other commercial premises allows you to turn on and off the lights at specific times, which means that the lights do not will not be left idle unnecessarily to raise the electricity bill.
Think about energy consumption in the kitchen of the company
"It's the season of excesses and so the kitchens at home and at work tend to work overtime during the holidays. With colleagues who gather in the kitchen, eager to warm tartlets to share at the office or prepare hot cups of hot chocolate in the afternoons, energy costs can start to increase.
Encouraging members of your staff to use common sense considerations, however, can help reduce energy costs in your office kitchen. For example, encourage employees to use the right sized pot when they cook or heat food on the stove burners, as a simple way to reduce electricity costs. Ask employees to avoid opening the oven door while cooking and so let the heat escape.
When it comes to saving energy, it is often the simplest but most neglected things that can have the greatest impact.
To learn more, check out these additional energy saving tips for the end of the year parties.
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