One of the recommendations from Envirowise was to review our lighting system to look for energy savings. Generally, all the lights are switched on in the morning and they are left on all day until everyone goes home. But there are areas of the factory that are used mainly for storage and are unoccupied for large parts of the day, yet the lights remain on all day wasting energy. So to overcome this problem, I have been looking into installing Passive Infa Red (PIR) sensors that will switch on the lights only when someone is working in the area. Another suggestion was to replace our existing T8 fluorescent tubes with thinner, more efficient T5 versions. T5s use about 50% less energy and last 3 times longer than T8s so it should be well worth the investment.

One useful company that I came across when doing this research is Chalmor. They are a lighting specialist who can advise on the best way to save energy on lighting systems. They can offer a wide range of energy saving products, consultancy service and can arrange installation as well. Their website is very useful too - I came across this calculator that works out how much energy (and money) you could save by switching from T8s to T5s and what the payback period is likely to be. I called Chalmor to arrange a review of our factory lighting and someone came to visit the factory within a week. They will put together a report for us with some recommendations on how we can save energy on lighting bills and estimate the cost, projected energy and financial savings, and pay back period. I’m looking forward to hearing about how much they can save us.

Envirowise is a government funded organisation whose target is to help businesses reduce waste and hence save money. All the advice they give is free and confidential so I would urge any businesses out there, however big or small to contact them for a free visit. It’s a very simple process. A couple of weeks ago I filled in a very straightforward online form on the Envirowise website requesting a FastTrack visit from one of their advisers. Someone called me within a week to arrange a convenient time for a visit. The visit itself lasted about 2 hours with a bit of time spent discussing things in the office before heading out into the factory and offices for a tour.

They made a number of recommendations to help us save energy and reduce waste and it was useful to have someone look at our setup with a fresh eye.

In terms of energy saving, there are 2 big areas that we could make savings:-lighting and heating. Several areas within our premises are used mainly for storage yet they have the same light levels as areas in which several people are working. We could easily change this by removing lights or fitting motion sensors so that the lights only come on when someone is in the area. Even in my own office, light levels could easily be reduced. I have 8 fluorescent tubes in my office but 4 would be plenty to light the whole office sufficiently. (I have moved offices so I no longer have the LED lights) With heating, insulation is the key, particularly because most of our heating is electric. Excluding draughts and preventing warm air escaping will help keep the heating bills down in the winter.

In terms of waste management, the adviser said that we are generally doing the right things but we need to make more of an effort to prevent waste occurring, particularly food waste. There is currently a lot of waste muesli that ends up in the bins and this is something that I’ll be addressing in the future. Other ways to improve recycling rates are to put better labels on the bins showing what can go in each one, and to try to give staff more incentive to recycle.

Envirowise will be sending me a report, hopefully by the end of the week and from that I’ll be able to work out what the potential cost saving to the business will be should we implement all the measures they suggest. Overall I found the visit very useful and informative and I’m sure that we’ll be taking forward some of the suggestions that they made. I would recommend that every business takes advantage of this free resource – it could easily save you money as well as improving your waste management systems.

For the last few weeks I’ve been reviewing all the different renewable energy technologies that are available to us, focussing particularly on wind turbines, solar hot water and solar photovoltaic systems. A summary of what I’ve found out is given in the table below.

After discussing this with the rest of the management team here, we’ve decided that the system that is best for our site is the solar thermal system that will provide hot water for the factory. We discounted wind turbines because we were advised that our roof is not really suitable for mounting turbines and the average wind speeds in our location are very low so we would not generate much power. Solar photovoltaics are just too expensive at the moment and have a very long payback even if we did manage to get a grant from the DTI’s Low Carbon Building Programme. At the moment, all our hot water is provided by an electric emersion heater so installing a solar thermal system will reduce the amount of electricity that we use on site, thus reducing our energy bills all year round. Although the savings will not be massive because we don’t have a big hot water demand, there’s a potential 4% return on our investment, which isn’t too bad. And if we are successful in getting a DTI grant, that will increase to an 8% return which is actually pretty good. More on this when I’ve had some detailed quotes back from solar panel installers.