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How can businesses improve energy efficiency?
Energy efficiency is extremely beneficial to a business, whether it’s helping to reduce the bottom line or limiting your impact on the environment. According to the Carbon Trust, most businesses can cut their energy costs by at least 10% and often by 20% with simple actions that give quick returns, e.g. minimising lighting usage.
Reducing energy wastage has multiple benefits but how exactly can you become more energy efficient?
First Step - Visibility
To improve energy efficiency, you first of all need to identify where the inefficiencies lie within your business. To do so you will need to implement an effective energy monitoring solution, whereby it will monitor each piece of equipment or asset and highlight any anomalies across a facility to indicate issues.
Our energy monitoring solution offers an in-depth insight into your energy usage patterns. Our solution connects to existing metering infrastructure, offering a range of connectivity solutions for ultimate monitoring. From day one, our platform asset monitoring systems uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to automatically recognise patterns and spot anomalies.
This estate-wide view of your consumptions means you have accurate and real-time data that can drive your efficiency decisions. The data highlights core issues such as a faulty HVAC system or excessive use of lighting.
Second Step - Time to Change
Once you have access to this birds-eye view of energy consumption across your entire estate, you will be able to determine where inefficiencies lie and which areas would highly benefit from improvements. The insightful information provided by an effective energy monitoring solution means energy or facility managers can begin to make truly data-driven decisions.
Take for example you are a retailer, many stores use lighting throughout the entire day, consistently on full brightness. Lighting is deemed as the most expensive utility cost for retailers and accounts for 33% of energy consumption within supermarkets. However, simple changes to the brightness levels dependent on footfall or external light levels could significantly drop energy consumption and save retail giants thousands each year.
The Hark Platform has the potential to automatically control lighting and other assets based on a range of factors. With the utilisation of cutting edge IoT sensors, the platform can consistently monitor ambient light levels on the façade of the building and simultaneously adjust internal light brightness in accordance with external levels. Savings of between 25-35% have been experienced when retailers maximise the use of daylight. This helps drive energy efficiency within the store without a dependency on human input.
Final Step - Constant Refinement
Over time your energy usage will constantly adapt especially when you are implementing energy efficiency changes. With each change, it is important to monitor the results and the level of improvement so that you can determine which changes are the most effective and if there are further improvements to be made. To become as energy efficient as possible you must constantly refine your strategy to meet with your current challenges.
If you would like to improve energy efficiency within your business, then get in touch to find out how the Hark Platform can help you get there.