You don’t have to be any sort of financial expert to realize that energy bills are becoming more expensive and that keeping these bills to a minimum will help your business to thrive – or at least survive. As a manufacturing business owner, though, you can’t just ‘turn things off’, so you might be left scratching your head as to how you go about it.
You might not think it, but there are some easy steps you can take to make your business more energy efficient, starting today. Here are some of them discussed below.
Source more energy-efficient machinery
This might seem like a common-sense move, but it is often neglected because it involves an upfront cost. For this reason, you might want to prioritize these changes to the areas where they will make the most difference. As the US Department of Energy reports that compressed air systems can account for up to 10% of the electricity your business uses, this might be an excellent place to start.
Visiting specialists like https://cbeuptime.com/compressor-central/rotary-vane-air-compressors/ can give you a good idea of what options are available to replace or add to what you already have.
Maintain the machinery you already have to make it run more efficiently
You can’t replace everything, but you can get everything running as efficiently as possible, so it uses less power to get the same results. This can’t be done overnight, but putting in place a cleaning and preventative maintenance program will start to show results quite quickly. This can also have the knock-on effect of limiting downtime, meaning that you don’t have to pay associated utilities and increase the overhead ratio for the extra amount of time you need to be working to make up for the lost time.
Regular inspections
This is not so much about the machinery itself but what they produce. Keeping an eye on quality and ensuring the customer gets a better product also means that you are likely to catch faults sooner in the production process. Fewer faults mean less rework, which in turn means the machines aren’t running for so long and, as a result, are using a smaller amount of electricity.
Training staff
This is another aspect that is often neglected because of cost but is yet another example of a false economy in action, as training staff has a host of benefits. Trained staff members are less likely to make mistakes and cause rework, and you already know rework uses up more energy. Well-trained staff also tend to work faster, meaning more gets done in less time, and the machine is not running for as long. All of this adds up to money saved and not money spent, if not straight away, then definitely in the longer term.
Final thoughts
Making your company more energy efficient might involve some activities that you hadn’t thought of and ones that might require an upfront cost. This is likely to include buying new machinery, maintaining what remains, and training your staff to use all of it. This, along with keeping an eye on quality to keep rework to a minimum, can mean that machinery is running for a shorter amount of time, saving energy and keeping your bills down when it matters the most.
