The cost of overhead can be one of the greatest expenses for a business, and if you’re not using your equipment wisely you could be running up that power bill faster than you know it.
Working with office equipment as long as I have, over 30 years and counting, I’ve learned the ins and outs of how to use them efficiently and keep that power bill to a minimum. In this post I will share with you some of my best office energy saving tips to keep your business running lean into the new year.
My Best Office Energy Saving Tips
First, upgrade your equipment. Modern day office equipment — such as copiers, printers, and multifunctional units — are designed to use less energy than older models. One of the smartest things you can do for your bottom line is to upgrade to newer equipment. I know how that sounds, considering the goal is to save money, but having newer equipment in your office will save you money in the long run due to lower power usage by design.
Use automatic shut off. Chances are, regardless of the age of your machine, it has some kind of automatic shut off feature. Make use of this feature, and have the machine power down when you know it absolutely will not be in use.
Be careful with this, because you don’t want to irritate the rest of the office by having it shut down too frequently. Constantly powering up a machine that is always turned off is a poor use of office time, not to mention annoying to your coworkers.
My best advice is to set it like this: set it to go into low energy mode after 60 minutes, then have it completely power down after 3-4 hours of non-use. In addition, I highly recommend setting it to automatically shut off at the end of the day.
Just as you can set it to automatically turn off, you can set it to automatically turn on. Set it to automatically power on before the start of the work day, and you’ll be saving energy while practically on autopilot. Copiers draw a lot of current. Even if you have a new, energy efficient machine, you can still reduce that electric bill even further by having them power down when not in use.
Of course, it’s not just copiers and printers in your office that draw current, there are a host of other electronics to think about as well. No, I’m not going to suggest walking around the office and powering everything down at the end of the day, there’s a much better way to do it.
One of my favourite office energy saving tips are simple power bars and surge protectors. With these, in addition to their primary functions, you can shut down multiple pieces of equipment at once. With power bars and surge protectors it’s easy to get in the habit of flicking a switch and powering down equipment at the end of the day that you don’t need to have running all night long.
Think it’s just large pieces of equipment that you need to worry about? Not at all, even little gadgets can be racking up your electric bill every month. I’m talking about those gadgets we carry with us every day that need to be recharged.
Phones, tablets, laptops, the list goes on. These rechargeable electronics tend to sit for long periods of time after being fully charged, which is completely unnecessary. Believe it or not, these are still consuming power even when fully charged.
If you leave these pieces of equipment in your office overnight, try to get in the habit of taking the charging cable out of them at the end of the day. Don’t worry, they’ll still be charged when you get back in the morning, and you’ll have saved energy overnight.
If you have any other questions about office energy saving tips, or would like some guidance on the best kind of equipment to buy to save energy, please leave a comment or use the contact form on the right sidebar.
EKO symbol RGB” by Riksanteri – Own work. Licensed under Public Domain via Commons.
