The Bottom Line
Any business owner knows about the bottom line, and every business owner tries to find ways to improve profits and reduce expenses — but few realize how achieving lower energy bills can have a profound effect on that all-important final number. Energy costs aren’t just your electric bill (though that is usually the most significant part) — they also include your gas bill (if relevant), your HVAC costs, and even your water bill. In order to start cutting energy costs, you need to know exactly what they are and how to examine them.
Your water bill is probably your least-important in terms of cutting energy costs, but if you have a large building, or an operation that uses a lot of water, it’s still well worth examining. The main item you want to look at on your water bill is your overall consumption of water. If it spikes, look for plumbing problems. If it seems unreasonably high overall, examine employee behavior and retrain them as necessary — often, employees will do things like run a company dishwasher for very few dishes (because they want to get theirs clean before they go home for the day.) This kind of activity, when repeated over months by multiple employees, can dramatically affect your water bill.
Your gas bill, if you use natural gas for heating water or air, or if you use gas-based machinery such as stove tops, also deserves a few minutes of attention each month. All of the things you looked for in your water bill apply here as well, but with a profound addition: if your gas usage spikes, it could be an indicator of a hidden gas leak. Generally, the odor put into natural gas will alert workers of such an event, but if the leak is within your walls or in a well-ventilated area, it could go unnoticed but still present a risk to your business.
HVAC costs can be more complex. Because you have a more direct ability to control the temperature in your building, the HVAC bill brings up the first major opportunity for cutting energy costs. It’s worth an experiment: try raising or lowering your business’ thermostat by five degrees for a month, and see what the effect on your HVAC bill is. If your inside temperature is relatively close to your outside temperature, the results can be surprising. (Then again, if it’s fourteen degrees outside, the difference in maintaining a sixty-five degree temperature versus a seventy-degree temperature is going to be barely noticeable.) Such an experiment should be enough to prove to even the most resistant manager that lower energy bills are a powerful factor in improving profitability.
Finally, we have the elephant: the electric bill. There are such a huge plethora of factors that come together to form your overall electric bill that it’s almost pointless to go into a detailed discussion — it’s better to perform an electricity audit, or acquire a tool that will monitor your electricity usage and thus allow you to see where your major areas of consumption lie. Only when armed with the proper information can you see exactly what you can do to get lower energy bills and a better overall bottom line.