Embracing sustainability and becoming more energy efficient has become a new goal in the past two decades. With new technologies and processes to help businesses do this, as well as a growing public sentiment to become more carbon neutral, now is the time for businesses to change their ways.
Here are five tips on how your business can become more energy efficient.
Do Compressed Air Audits
If your company is like many other manufacturing companies, you are probably working with machinery that uses a lot of compressed air or hydraulic fluids. Making sure that the lines running this air and these fluids do not have any leaks is one step that you can take in order to reduce your energy bills.
Compressed air takes a lot of energy to maintain, and considering that most of these lines are not replaced unless they break, you could be sitting on compressed airlines that have small enough holes to not be detected, but large enough to cost you thousands of dollars in energy costs each year.
Let Your Employees Decide How to Help
Often times employees will know better than their managers where power is being wasted. Consider your average shop floor.
A manager might not know that certain machines are left on during shifts where nobody is running them. Operators know that this is happening, and they have the ability to do something about it. Share your common goal with your operators and employees and let them contribute where they can.
Have them shut off their machinery when they are done with it and turn off lights when they are not using certain sections of warehouse. You will be surprised and how much your employees know about saving energy.
Replace Your Office Windows
If your company is like many other companies, machinery and plant improvements come before any office updates are made. This means that your windows and doors are probably very old.
Replacing these is a must for any company that wants to be more energy efficient. New windows will not only keep the office warmer in the winter (which always seems to be a problem) and cooler in the summer, but they will also reduce your air conditioning and heating bills.
Consider Alternative Energy Sources
Alternative or renewable energy sources is new territory for your typical manufacturing plant. Usually these plants are connected to the grid, which provides the reliable and consistent power that they need. Now, however, alternative energy sources have been made in a way that they are also reliable.
These renewable types of power, such as wind and solar for business, can be integrated directly with the power grid so that when the cells run out of power there is no interruption when the grid kicks back in. These are also getting less expensive to install, and the savings in the end is definitely noticeable.
Invest in New Machinery
Probably the easiest way to make your plant more energy efficient is to invest in newer, more energy efficient machinery and technology. If your plant is like most, your machines could be 30 or even 40 years old.
Buying a new machine will help you save on your electric bill by taking advantage of power saving technologies that have developed over the past decade. You are also likely to get more output out of new machines due to advances in how they are designed, and your labor hours are also likely to go down due to the lower labor requirements of these machines.
Energy efficiency is a hot-button issue for most manufacturing plants today. Due to recent developments in machinery, alternative power, and technology, this historically expense endeavor now pays dividends in the end.