Stop Paying for Utilities. Here is How
Utility bills in most cases aren’t a very large expense. However, it’s the easiest and cheapest expense to reduce in a business for us. So whether you have a huge facility or a small office or shop, we’ll teach you how we help businesses reduce their utility bills from one month to the next.
We’ll be using a fictional business to be able to showcase the absolute most challenging conditions and be able to share absolutely every step. Our fictional business will be a factory with office space and a store. We won’t be coming up with exact numbers just the situation so it’ll be super easy to showcase the factors that matter.
Firstly, we need to look at lighting. We are going to check what type of lighting is in place and how much of each type and we are also going to check how much natural light we get in some spaces. Because most of this building is factory space, we don’t have any natural lighting in the majority of the building. We see that there is a lot of CFL tubes everywhere and the store has some incandescent bulbs throughout. This leads to a big issue and that shows on the bills. These lights, while cheaper than LED lights, are much less efficient and do cost much more to operate. This gives a huge opportunity however, we can turn off certain lights. Most buildings that we have seen have too many light fixtures, especially older buildings. This means that you can turn off plenty of lights and still get sufficient lighting. In the factory we will not do this change as that can lead to safety concerns. However in the store and in the office we will do this. We’ll do some testing to ensure we don’t have lost productivity or less sales due to slightly lower lighting. Once we determine what the minimum lighting amount is without affecting either figure. We will recommend to turn off those lights. Once this is done we should be seeing significant savings without spending any amount of money to get them. This will help to build up funds to start replacing lights within the building. We should be seeing savings anywhere from $100-$700 per month in this case with the amount of lights we have it’ll be closer to the $700.
Now that we have the funds built up and can start replacing lights, how do we replace them. Firstly we’ll identify the best option to replace the lights with. Since we only earn based on what we save you, we’ll recommend the best option since both of our interests align. We’ll determine the best option for you based on price, lighting color and intensity, longevity, usage, and price to instal. This last step is extremely important, especially when replacing CFL tubes. Sometimes an electrician will have to do major changes to the fixtures in order to instal certain LED replacements, this will rapidly bring up costs. We’ll also test different colors and brightness to find the best fit. It’s important that your employees and customers are comfortable but even more important that they are in the right mood to either make them more productive or more willing to buy.
Determining the replacement while on paper should be super simple (just put LEDs) in, figuring out exactly which ones is a bit harder as you saw. Now we have the choice. We can start implementing. We’ll go in sections and base the amount of lighting changed per section on the savings we made earlier. So with those savings we can go in sections of about $700 a month. This will make sure we never have to add any funds from anywhere else in the business and the lighting is purely paying for itself. We’ll start by changing the lights with the highest usage in order to get the biggest ROI possible. This will be something we’ll calculate for you and we’ll know exactly what order to replace every bulb in the building.
The best part about changing lights this way is every month we get more and more savings so we can change lighting in bigger chunks. After the first month of lighting changes we should see additional savings of at least $700 more. So for this second month our budget doubles and we can replace up to $1,400 worth of lights. We’ll repeat this process until every old light is replaced.
Water and temperature control are also huge utility expenses. We’ll cover that in another article as just making improvements to the lighting can cut your utility bills in half. You just saw how that is possible to do for absolutely no upfront cost, due to how well we managed and planned each step. So if you want those benefits in your business, you want no upfront cost, and to not have to plan out any of this. Book a Building EIP with the button below. Remember, you only pay based on what we save you, and we’ll cover every aspect of your building.
Building Efficiency Improvement Plan (EIP)
Reduces the costs of operating a building by reducing utility and maintenance costs. Areas covered include:
Lighting, cooling, heating, water, plants, equipment. Full energy audit also included.
Price: 40% of savings during first 36 months.
