Energy Management Tips For Hotels and Restaurants

Keeping your hotel and or restaurant well-lit, warm, and operating smoothly with the right tools is essential to impressing your guests. However, with the current energy costs soaring, it can be difficult to cover the bills. 

As a business energy provider, we have been helping our customers manage their rising bills, offering our best tips and advice to help keep costs down. For the hospitality industry, lots of energy is required to offer the very best service, so keeping costs low can seem like a far greater challenge. However, with the right advice, you can aim to lower your energy consumption, thus managing your business electricity and gas bills. Below are some of the ways we would recommend managing your energy consumption and costs.

Schedule a business energy audit

One of the first and most effective actions you can take as a business is to schedule an energy audit. As we have touched on in previous blogs, an energy audit will provide you with an assessment of your business’ energy consumption and energy efficiency. This information, provided by an external auditor or by a DIY checklist, will provide you with some initial recommendations that will help you to improve the energy efficiency of your business. This information will be unique to your business type and also the premises, meaning the steps you choose to take will be effective. 

Monitor your heating and cooling systems 

Any modern hospitality business, whether you run a restaurant, bar or hotel, will have heating and cooling systems in place. Perfect for maintaining a comfortable climate for your guests and staff, however these systems can impact your energy costs quite considerably! To ensure you are not overusing these systems and wasting money on heating and cooling your business, be sure to monitor these closely. Most systems will allow you to set a regular temperature. We would recommend staying between 18-20 degrees celsius when heating your premises. 

Maintain your commercial fridges 

Commercial fridge freezers consume far more energy than the standard domestic fridge freezer, making these a costly expense. However, commercial fridges are essential in the daily running of a commercial kitchen or bar. In order to maintain your fridges whilst reducing your energy consumption and keeping your bills low, we would suggest having these services regularly, whilst also ensuring they are not left open for long periods of time. Servicing a fridge can make a huge difference in the quality of its output, meaning the fridge won’t have to consume excess amounts of energy to maintain a regular, cool temperature. 

Shutdown unused electrical equipment 

Throughout a large hospitality business, such as a hotel, you may find lots of electrical equipment and tools that are consuming electricity but do not need to be. This is where the energy audit comes into play again. An energy audit could help identify these electrical items, giving you an idea of just what and how many electrical appliances may not need to be switched on permanently. Simply shutting down these items could make a real difference to your bills. 

Motivate your staff to save energy while on shift 

A positive attitude amongst your staff regarding energy saving and sustainability will support your business in its efforts to cut down consumption. Promoting this amongst your teams can be as simple as creating a checklist of electrical appliances to monitor, communicating your goals with your staff, asking your staff for ideas, and ensuring every team member is involved. 

For more information about your business energy bills or to discuss options for cutting energy consumption, do not hesitate to get in touch with the D-ENERGi team.