Business owners and managers are always on the hunt for cost savings, and there are few costs bigger than your energy bill. Smart electricity meters have become a powerful means to help track down electricity use and capture savings, but many businesses don’t make the most of this valuable tool.
Where Is Your Energy Going?
When your company’s electricity is being monitored by smart meters, you may be able to pinpoint which areas are the biggest users of electricity. This may seem most applicable to businesses that have more than one location, like a chain of retail stores, but in fact smart metering may be able track down your biggest energy users even if your business is located all on one property. Depending on the size of your main facility and whether there are any outbuildings, as well as outdoor lighting, you may have a number of meters installed to monitor usage at various locations on the property. So judging where your energy is going is as simple as checking the totals for each meter. Getting a breakdown of which areas are costing you the most is vital to judging the cost-efficiency of your business electricity plan.
When Are You Using the Most Electricity?
One of the most helpful things that a smart electricity meter can do is to give a business insight into what times of day are most costly from an energy use perspective. Your smart meter can provide you with insight into what times of day your business is using more or less power. You can plainly see how much of your consumption happens during peak times when electricity is most costly. That information may help you plan your business’s operations to minimise power-hungry activities during the times when rates are the highest. While many businesses cannot make radical changes to their operating hours, having data on specific times of day that are high usage can help you evaluate whether the work being done at those times is being done in the most
What Can You Change to Save Money?
Once you have the visibility into your electricity consumption that a smart meter provides, you can assess what adjustments can be made to save energy. The information you learn about the big electricity users may convince you that it is time to invest in upgrading some of your equipment. You may decide to alter some of your processes, perhaps to move more energy-intensive work to off-peak times in order to take advantage of lower electricity rates. Adjusting the settings of your HVAC controls is one of the more common changes business owners make once they see how much energy they use simply keeping their buildings comfortable for human occupancy.
Where Can You Find This Valuable Data?
Your smart meter communicates throughout the day with your electricity provider, updating your energy consumption data multiple times per hour. So what does this mean for how easily you can access your meter’s readings? Rather than waiting for your electricity bill to get a broad overview of how much energy you used throughout the whole billing period, you can find out how much power your business has been using within the same week that it was actually used. By logging onto your energy company’s website, you can see the consumption totals that each smart meter has sent to the provider under your account.
The proactive use of a smart electricity meter can be a great way to make all of your facilities less wasteful and your energy bills a bit less costly. When it comes to your business’s smart meter, knowledge about power is power!
