28 Feb
Energy Management Tips For Hotels and Restaurants
Posted on Feb 28, 2023
by D-ENERGi
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.
What is P272? P27what? You aren’t alone in the dark about P272. P272 is regarded as one of the biggest shakeups to the business electricity market since deregulation. Sounds more like a character out of star wars, but here are some facts on P272, which we have put together hopefully jargon free. If you unsure on how P272 affects your business please do not hesitate to contact us for free on 0800 781 7626, we will be delighted to help you further. You may also like to view our infographic and visit our support page dedicated to the P272 OFGEM legislation.
The Facts – What Is P272
P272 is a new regulation which has been implemented by OFGEM. It affects the way suppliers settle electricity consumption for businesses with a specified energy use. Resulting in sites being changed to half hourly.
Remember, remember the 5th November… “Guy Fawkes?”. No, no… this is when the P272 migration began! The deadline for all sites to be settled to Half-Hourly is 1st April 2017. Don’t be fooled by the date, it really is 1st April! Also, don’t be put off by the 2017 threat – it’ll be here before you know it!
The settlement is being put in place in order for suppliers to balance the amount of energy being purchased from the Generators. The aim for P272 is to make the readings more accurate via the half hourly consumption. This will provide distributors with more understanding on electricity use. This results in networks ensuring they are sufficiently developed and maintained.
Ultimately, P272 helps you and your business manage and also use the energy smartly. It gives you the opportunity to see where and when you are consuming energy. Also, a more accurate settlement which could lead to better tariff rates… something nobody would say no to, agreed?
Now you (hopefully) have a little more understanding of P272 here is how to prepare:
Learn if your portfolio is affected.
Speak to your supplier, they will be more than happy to explore your options with you.
Select your Half-Hourly Meter and Data Collector.
If your business has a maximum demand electricity supply categorised by profile classes:
05 06 07 08
And you have an Automated Meter Reading meter of which is capable of HH data collection and remote programming. Just to let you know… 160,000 sites are affected so it is definitely worth double, maybe even triple checking!
“How do I check?!” I hear you say? Simple… you just check the S number at the top of your electricity bill to find out your sites profile class.
Believe it or not, P272 can be very beneficial for you and here’s why:
You receive accurate billing
It offers you the ability to avoid peak times of electricity use
It gives you an insight on your energy usage
It allows you to make room for an opportunity of improvement and efficiency
REMEMBER…
This is an OFGEM regulation affecting ALL maximum demand meters and ALL electricity suppliers equally. If you’re being advised P272 does not affect your business, please let us double check this for you.
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A Russian rocket blasted into space this month to investigate whether any methane gas is present on Mars, as part of the joint ExoMars project created by the European and Russian space agencies.
Methane is a gas created by living microbes, and if it were to be detected it would be a revelation in the space industry as it could prove that life exists or existed on the red planet, some 225 million kilometres away from the Earth (which is itself something of a shock, given that in 2003 Mars was a mere 56 million kms away).
We already know there is life-giving water on Mars. Just like the Earth it has ice caps, although the water they contain is more elusive. The American space agency NASA made a huge discovery in 2006 when it found there was water flowing through the planet in even the hottest months of the year, and that the ‘lines’ that appear on our satellite images of Mars are streaks of flowing salt water.
That’s when the questions ‘did life exist on Mars, and can we find out?’ really started to arise.
The ExoMars project involves sending up a Trace Gas Orbiter to sniff the Martian atmosphere for methane, and if the results are positive then this would establish that methane has been generated via geology or a biological process.
As part of the same mission, a stationary lander called Schiaparelli will test the technology for a subsequent mission – ExoMars 2018 – which will see a UK-built rover collect soil samples filled with water particles and drill below the planet’s surface to look for other signs of life. That’s when the search for Martian life will start in earnest.
These two projects combined will cost an eye-watering £900 million but isn’t it worth it for the chance to make one of the biggest discoveries of all time? What a time to be alive!
Planetary scientist Dr Peter Grindrod, from Birkbeck, University of London, who is funded by the UK Space Agency, certainly thinks so. “It’s incredibly exciting,” he enthused. “This is a series of missions that’s trying to address one of the fundamental questions in science: is there life anywhere else besides the Earth? Finding that life exists elsewhere in the solar system would be a huge discovery, so the evidence has to be strong. As they say, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”
Wouldn’t it be amazing to find out if there really is Life On Mars, or if there has been in the past. It’s astonishing to think there could be more than just us Earthlings in our solar system!
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