With the new year around the corner and a possible recession on the horizon, it is more important than ever to find cost-saving avenues that pad your 2023 budget with extra dollars. Facility managers around the country are being tasked to stretch their budgets further than any time in recent history while resources and budgets are shrinking. It can be difficult to find savings in an already tight budget, but it is possible. Let’s look at five easy and fast ways to add money back into your facility’s utility budget without sacrificing comfort at your site.
1. Perform A Building Audit
The easiest way to save money in your commercial building is by understanding where it may be getting wasted. Building energy analyses help facility managers take the guess work out of energy spend and repair budgets. Building audits should be completed on a yearly or even quarterly basis to measure the functional condition of major appliances and to track energy usage. This small task allows you to prevent budget overages in the coming year and make sure your building is running at peak efficiency. One minor change, like a change in lighting schedules, can lead to thousands of dollars saved.
Building audits can help: Optimize energy consumption, diagnose problems with large onsite appliances like HVACs, evaluate the need to shift to backup power sources as needed to maintain service levels and generate energy cost savings, use AI and machine learning to analyze data captured onsite, and more.
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2. Participate In A Demand Response Program
Demand response programs enable your business to get paid cash for playing an active role in grid stability. Enrolling in a demand response program unlocks new revenue opportunities through grid services, reduces energy costs, eases grid stress, and supports the community.
GridPoint’s technology uses customized curtailment strategies to slowly lower temperatures or adjust schedules automatically before an event is called. That way, there is little to no impact on customer or site comfort. With very little effort, you can get payments, financial rebates, and credits. One GridPoint customer earned an additional $50,000 through demand response rebates and incentives alone in 2019.
Find a Demand Response Program here.
3. Adopt A Predictive Maintenance Approach
There are three types of maintenance that facility managers can utilize when addressing problems with HVAC units: preventative, reactive, and predictive. Preventative maintenance is a scheduled maintenance that, just like its name, prevents critical issues. Reactive maintenance occurs when equipment has already broken down or malfunctioned to restore equipment to its normal functioning status. Predictive maintenance is a technique that uses condition-monitoring tools and techniques to monitor the performance of a structure or a piece of equipment during operation.
Reactive maintenance can be extremely costly and put the comfort of both employees and customers at risk with prolonged outages, or worse, a loss in revenue due to having to stop operations.
Because predictive maintenance addresses problems before appliances stop working, it is highly cost effective, saving roughly 8%-12% over preventive maintenance, and up to 40% over reactive maintenance. Predictive maintenance gives you the time to order parts, address maintenance needs, and, ultimately, extend the life of existing appliances, eliminating the need to purchase new machines.
4. Employ An Energy Management System
Energy management systems provide immediate cost savings through energy reduction and can save you up to 30% on your energy bill from day one. With an effective monitoring and metering system, you can identify which assets are wasting the most energy and prioritize their overall consumption reduction. Energy management systems allow you to generate energy and operational savings, and optimize capital expenditure by installing submetering, monitoring, and control systems across all onsite assets and equipment.
Energy management systems can also prevent truck rolls, or costly repairs, as they identify HVAC issues before they become a major problem allowing you to easily perform predictive maintenance. Monitoring systems use AI to collect data about your facility’s HVAC system, understand long-term, trending HVAC system issues, and help prioritize maintenance. This allows you to extend the life of existing equipment and reduce the need for new equipment.
5. Start A Free Pilot Program With GridPoint
Put these tips to work with a free pilot of GridPoint’s energy management system. Our pilot program is perfect for commercial businesses looking to optimize and reduce overall operating costs.
The program provides hands-on experience using GridPoint Intelligence across multiple sites at no cost. The 90-day program allows you to validate results and supports the integration and operational success of our platform with your existing facilities. After the completion of the pilot program, you can continue your partnership with GridPoint or walk away, risk-free. It’s that simple.
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The pilot will give you everything you need to enter 2023 with money padding your budget including:
- GridPoint Intelligence Platform: Our smart controller and energy optimization software.
- GridPoint Smart Thermostat
- Zone Sensors and Duct Probes
- 90-Days of Energy Advisory Services
- Asset Health Report
- Immediate Energy Savings
