Since air conditioning reports became mandatory in January it’s been quite a surprise to see just how many London businesses are in line for a financial saving.
The truth is that – while it’s never been a secret that air conditioning is energy hungry equipment – it seems many businesses have just accepted this as a fact of life and lived with higher than necessary bills.
But now that air conditioning systems need to be inspected for efficiency every 5 years by a professionally trained inspector, all is about to change. Certainly in the months since the January deadline has passed we’ve uncovered thousands of pounds worth of savings for our clients.
And those savings have been identified from a range of inspections covering different types of buildings across London, including air conditioning in shops, offices and cinemas with the most recent being the final survey in a group of 8 NHS hospitals.
The nice thing for the owners or managers of these systems has been that some of the solutions have had no cost while other improvements that require expenditure will more than likely qualify for government funds to carry out the work.
One of the problems has been that historically there wasn’t an easy way to work out exactly what the electricity consumption has been from air conditioning when faced with just a standard quarterly bill. Things are slowly changing though; many new systems have meters that separately record the air conditioning system’s consumption.
Metering makes watching out for the savings achieved after taking up on the report’s recommendations easier and is just one of the ways that the owner can be made aware of waste – and now’s a pretty popular time to be showing businesses where their money is inadvertently being lost.
Efficiency needn’t be a luxury – London can still be cool but with lower bills!