60% of schools' gas is consumed when they are closed. This is very wasteful and represents the easiest opportunity to save energy by making sure that your boiler is not scheduled to come on at weekends and by having a procedure in place to turn it off before holidays. If there is legitimate usage e.g. community use, then you should ensure only those parts of the building are heated and not the whole school. If a member of staff wants to come in it is normally more efficient to ask them to use an electric fan heater just for the area they are working in. Contractors often do physical work and do not generally need the heating to be left on.

Energy Sparks analyses your school’s out of house usage. You can compare how your school does against others using our benchmarking tool.

The easiest approach to permanently fix this issue is to use the Energy Sparks checklist for your building manager or caretaker to implement just before a holiday - including turning the heating off. There should be a frost protection setting for winter holidays and weekends.