Manufacturers are often faced with steep utility bills. They may have high electric bills, high water bills, or both. This is why making a few minor changes could result in significant energy savings that also help the business’s bottom line. Better yet, there are steps you can take to bring these costs down without hurting production. Here are 5 ways manufacturing businesses can reduce energy costs.
Reduce the Waste in Your Compressed Air System
Compressed air systems are often to blame when everyday energy usage is high. Creating compressed air requires energy. This is why leaking compressed air tanks and leaking pipework contribute to higher energy bills. Leaking seals in air compressors also have an impact. Air compressors use a significant amount of energy even when they’re idling, so you’ll want to turn them off when not in use.
Manage Peak Loads
You can’t tell when your peak energy demand occurs by reading your monthly utility bill. However, if you adopt automated meter reading technology, you’ll see when your peak energy usage is. This may allow you to identify the processes that consume the most energy so you can focus on reducing their power consumption. Or, you can take steps to shift when these peak loads occur, so that utility companies don’t charge you a premium for it.
For example, you can strategically schedule machinery use for when energy prices are lower, or you could stagger your equipment start-ups to reduce the energy spikes that accompany their activation. Peak demand charges can account for up to a third of your organisation’s utility bill.
Conduct an Energy Audit
While you may be aware of how much power you pay for every month, odds are that your facility is using half or less of it. The rest of the energy is lost – it is lost when air escapes from a leaking air compressor and with waste heat from inefficient industrial equipment, for example. It is lost when equipment is left on but isn’t running.
The solution is to conduct an energy audit to identify how much power is used and where. Furthermore, you need to determine when power is consumed without any benefit to the organisation. You may need to turn off equipment at the end of your shift, insulate heated pipes to minimise losses, or reduce delays in your operations so that equipment isn’t left idle.
Energy audits may also point out equipment that you need to upgrade to be more energy efficient. You can take things one step further by creating energy management teams that continually look for potential energy savings.
Negotiate Your Utility Bills
If you’re a large consumer, you are a major customer that utility companies will want to keep. One of the techniques you can use to reduce business water costs is negotiation, according to Utility Bidder. And if they can’t give you a better deal, there are plenty of services that will be more than happy to find one for you.
Make Your Heating and Ventilation System More Efficient
You can make your heating, ventilation and air conditioning system more efficient by investing in proper maintenance like replacing air filters regularly and having the equipment serviced regularly. If your organisation uses furnaces, optimise their operations so that they’re never under-utilised. You’re wasting a lot of energy if they’re on but not in use. Where possible, recover waste heat and use it elsewhere in the process.
Manufacturing companies account for a third of all energy usage, and they waste around a third of it, yet you can do a lot to reduce this waste. Doing so will help the company save money while reducing its environmental impact.
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