Month: February 2018

This is the second half of our two-part article on workplace energy efficiency. Last time, we discussed how external factors can influence the resource consumption and energy or maintenance expenditures your building may need. Yet, most of the direct ways to alter your power usage happens indoors from internal operations. Consider adding and practicing these energy-efficient building adjustments to reduce operation energy bills.

Wall Decor: Art, Insulation, and Sound Dampening

Insulation is one of the most important aspects of a building’s energy efficiency. It keeps the cold from escaping in the summer and the heat from escaping in the winter. It also serves to dampen sound between rooms to reduce echoes and unintentional sound carryover.

However, if you don’t have the capabilities to open your walls to add and change internal insulation, pieces of wall decor can be an alternative solution. Hanging heavy, decorative rugs or blankets can serve a triple purpose in the workplace. First, it can be nice wall art, which serves to break up long stretches of blank business wall. Second, all that fabric prevents drafts and helps to keep the cold from transferring between the outside wall to the inside rooms. Finally, the fibers of the fabric itself catch and disperse sound reducing both echoes inside rooms and transference of sound between rooms.

Company Settings for Monitors and Lights

Light is by far one of the costliest energy resources that we require to run a modern business. While LED bulbs and smart home/building automations save energy for the building environment, also consider your technology tools, like the power it takes to light up a monitor. Unless you’re in a sun-drenched or very brightly lit room, full monitor brightness is almost never necessary, and many people may prefer to work with dimmer monitors. Dimming all the monitors in the company even by 20% can make a noticeable difference in your power bill. Encourage employees to dim monitors as much as reasonably workable.

If your company runs a little non-traditionally, consider practicing “lights out” hours. Turn off most lights, and dim monitors. This can be a fun, interesting way to save money on a regular basis. Even if it only minimally affects your monthly energy bills, it can add up greatly over time.

Wi-Fi and Appliances at Night

Depending on the size of your business, you could be wasting energy broadcasting too large and too long of a Wi-Fi signal to cover your entire building at all times. Unless you have a night shift, you may not need wireless networking overnight after everyone has gone home. Consider setting your Wi-Fi broadcast to turn itself off at the end of the day and back on before the first shift starts. This can save a little money every night.

If your building has a night-time down cycle, the Wi-Fi router isn’t the only appliance or function you don’t need at night. Coffee pots, printers, and fans can all be switched off for nights and weekends with minimal to negligible impact on daily business life. You might even consider unplugging them to kill phantom power problems, as appliances continue to sip on tiny amounts of energy even when not in active use.

Thermostat Accuracy

Your HVAC system works with the thermostat to maintain indoor environments to match temperature settings, running either the air conditioning or the heater. The thermostat is an incredibly useful device, allowing us to judge the temperature of an entire room by taking measurements at a single point. Therefore, the location of your thermostat matters greatly. To get most accurate, comfortable, and efficient results from your thermostat, keep other appliances away from it to avoid poor temperature readings. When appliances run electricity, they generate heat, which can change the temperature locally. One or two large appliances near your thermostat can affect accurate readings, and affect HVAC systems to trigger (or not trigger) unexpectedly.

Every business strives to lower its overhead by improving energy efficiency. Simple practices of various techniques can lower your monthly and annual power costs. Your building also becomes more sustainable in your business practices. For more information on energy efficiency solutions for your commercial facilities, contact us today!

Energy efficiency movements are more than just a craze; it’s a financial reality. “Going green” has evolved to an incredibly practical way to save money on your power bill. Today, building managers can consider energy efficiency while paying less for better performance. Energy efficient appliances, materials, insulation, lights, and smart devices can greatly reduce your utility expenditures, but even routine maintenance around the building can significantly improve the energy efficiency of a business. While you’re putting together your budget for major upgrades, consider these small procedural and area adjustments that can easily and positively impact your energy consumption budget.

Take Care of Trees

Most businesses with their own grounds have a landscaping contract with a local service. This ensures that the grass is always cut, the flower beds are beautiful, the trees stay out of the power lines, and even the design is maintained throughout the year across changing seasons. Whatever your landscaping plan, those trees and shrubs are actually more useful than you may have imagined.

In summertime, your building heats up greatly with amount of sunlight that hits it. The more direct sunlight to the façade, the warmer the building gets, and the harder your air conditioning system must work to sustain a comfortable environment. One of the most useful services a tree can provide, other than creating oxygen, is to shade your building and help keep temperatures down. Blocking direct sunlight can drastically reduce temperatures, and thereby building cooling costs.

However, don’t let tree branches grow long enough to overhang rooftops; this creates an entirely different problem. Throughout the year, a heavy storm may cause limbs to directly break and fall. In addition, particularly wintertime, tree branches can become overloaded with heavy snow and ice. If a branch breaks over your roof and crashes to your building, it can do serious damage that will require repair. To serve all seasonal needs, grow big trees near the building, but prevent branches from overgrowth. Trim, prune, or cut branches from overhanging the roof by more than a foot or two.

Watch Out for Roof Snow

Snow has one of the biggest impacts on building operation utility bills. There is a fine line between useful snow on your rooftop and becoming a hazard. Snow can act like a blanket, insulating parts of your roof. On the other hand, potential risks start as snow begins to melt and refreeze. This is a particularly bad problem when piles stay in place for days, as partially melting and refreezing snow becomes dense, heavy, and change to partly solid ice. These piles can form ice dams and could even collapse weaker sections of a roof if the structure can no longer support it. If you can do so safely, try to keep your roof clear of excessively piled up snow with a rake, extended broom, or shovel.

Throughout all seasons, and especially in summer or winter, making your office building more energy efficient is a simple matter of thought and implementation. Of course, there are plenty of technologies and systems to automate sectors of your building to reduce energy costs, but even some minimal-effort practices and routine facility maintenance can do great for building operations.

In the next post, we discuss energy-efficient wall decor, appliances, office Wi-Fi settings, and more. Contact us today for more information on how we can help evaluate what areas of improvement your building needs and how our solutions, backed with advanced data and analysis, can make your office more energy efficient through building intelligence.

Facility operations require several different technologies to run and maintain various components, and to run them efficiently requires even more tech. Buildings will use many different resources to function normally, and paying for all these, especially if they’re wasted, adds up in the long run. Now, there are new technologies that will help with managing each building resource to minimize extraneous use and reduce operation costs.

Building Automation and Sensors

Many are familiar with building automation systems; they’re starting to become more common across many industries. For example, automated lights are installed in buildings, allowing them to turn on when a room is occupied and immediately turn off when vacant.

Generally, these systems use motion sensors to detect whether anyone is in the room, needing use of the lights. Based on the detection data from the motion sensors, lights can turn on or off readily. People don’t have to worry about lights inadvertently turning off when they’re in a room but relatively motionless, like sitting at a computer desk all day. Sensitive motion and other sensors can detect when a body is in a room. Thanks to these sensors, buildings won’t waste electricity activating lights clearly not in use.

Water Usage Reduction Tech

Today, many hot water tanks are constructed and designed to be more efficient than those of the past. Using a more efficient hot water tank can immediately result in a building consuming less water. Given the amount of energy that goes into heating water, this is also a change that will make a building generally more sustainable.

Saving water can also result from certain building automations. Sinks can be programmed to also turn off immediately, which can cut excessive water use. Most people only need so much water for tasks, and automatic sensors can reduce water from constant-flowing faucets to provide water only when needed.

Cooling and Heating

Buildings’ cooling and heating systems have a tremendous effect on overall energy consumption. Many buildings will run air conditioning at high levels consistently throughout the warmest parts of the year, even if it makes a building uncomfortably cold. Building heating systems can be just as problematic on the other end of the spectrum.

When these systems are replaced with more efficient systems, even automated ones, the building runs easier and becomes much more sustainable, since the system can use less resources to output energy for optimal environmental conditions. In many cases after implementing changes, occupants are more comfortable as well. Inefficient cooling and heating systems often waste a lot of energy while running but provide subpar output. Most newer and more advanced cooling and heating systems available run properly and use energy effectively, turning input resources to output energy better.

Other Energy Conservation Components

Energy conservation can be more complicated. It’s important to make sure the building itself is not using too many resources. Automation and efficient cooling and heating systems are only a few components in overall operations. If a lot of heat escapes from the building due to the design of windows or the lack of proper building insulation, for example, building operation costs will still be high, even with installations of new systems. Better insulation and windows that were designed to help buildings maintain internal temperatures more effectively can make a building significantly more energy efficient.

To find all your building’s areas of inefficient energy use, it is important to conduct a proper analysis on where inefficiencies lie and what areas can be improved. Like in the example above, adding new, technologically advanced systems throughout your building will benefit you little if energy is actually wasted through improper insulation. Contact us to learn more how an energy audit and breakdown can better pinpoint areas of your building to best invest to better use resources.

Employees play a large role in improving building management efficiency and reducing energy costs. Whether it be education and spreading the word via bulletin boards and e-mails, or participating in organized facility management improvement programs such as 20 Keys, there are many ways for employees to get involved and make a difference!

Some manufacturing companies use the 20 Keys program created by a Japanese manufacturer to improve a company’s efficiency. The book “20 Keys to Workplace Improvement (Manufacturing and Production)” by Iwao Kobayashi, describes the 20 keys to workplace improvement. For example, one element is Conserving Energy and Materials. Groups of employees work together on a committee to create goals and objectives to improve energy conservation and monitor water usage, electricity, and energy usage on a quarterly basis to work on improvements over time. This program goes hand in hand with the International Standard Organization (ISO) 14000 family, an environmental standard where companies also create goals and objectives towards improving energy.

There are even of ways to incentivize employees to get involved in energy conservation: launch a competition, create a green team, spread the word, and promote employee efforts. ENERGY STAR has a benchmarking competition workbook to get you started, guiding you to plan and lead an energy or water efficiency competition.

Our conservation analyses and solutions can supplement a 20 Keys or ISO 14000 program by monitoring and evaluating energy usage and training staff on methods to achieve building operation goals and reduce expenditures. Please contact us to learn how we can help your employees work on improving energy conservation in your company!