Ten tips to cut your business energy bill
Guest blog from HP's Business Answers blog - join HP's LinkedIn group for small business conversations and tips.
Turn off the air-conditioning and open some windows. In the winter, turn down the themostat by 1 degree centigrade, to cut your heating bills by up to 1 percent. Get an engineer to check and service your HVAC equipment regularly; optimising their performance can cut power bills. Clean filters regularly.
- Get an energy consumption monitor that will show you exactly how much power your company is using minute by minute. Go round the office, switch stuff off and see what devices are using the most power.
- Make sure people switch off lights when you leave the room.
- Replace regular light bulbs with energy-saving alternatives. They last longer and can save up £70 each over their lifetime.
- Choose modern, energy-efficient PCs. Look for systems that meet the Energy Star 4.0 requirement. For laptops, get power supply units that don't draw power (or very, very little) when they're not actually charging the laptop.
- Enable PC power settings such as HP Power Assistant (watch this video for more information)
- Use HP vPro™ technology to allow your IT department to update and fix PCs remotely, even if they are switched off. This means you don’t have to leave PCs on all night for updates.
- Make sure every device, such as projectors, printers and photocopiers have an energy-efficient standby mode and use it.
- Look at the energy rating of everyday appliances, such as fridges in staff rooms or desk fans, and make sure they are energy efficient too.
- Consider virtualising PCs and servers. Replacing a desktop PC with an average energy consumption of 60-80 watts with a thin client consuming just 12 creates an obvious saving. Similarly, consolidating multiple servers into one physical device with virtualisation can cut power consumption in the server room.