On average, 50% of schools’ electricity is consumed out of hours. This is your school's electricity baseload. Reducing the baseload is often the fastest way of reducing energy costs and reducing your carbon footprint. At a well-managed school the baseload should remain the same throughout the year. Every 1 kW of baseload reduced will save a school at least £1,300 per year, and reduce its carbon footprint by 1,800 kg.

Security lights, inefficient IT servers, computers, whiteboards and other electrical equipment which are left running when the school is closed all contribute to a high baseload. To fully determine the causes of your baseload usage you need to do a survey of what appliances are being left on overnight and their power consumption. There are a number of activities which can help you track down your baseload consumption:

You can normally reduce your baseload with low cost measures like training staff and pupils to turn off lighting and equipment when they leave classrooms. You can also ask your caretaker to monitor whether staff are leaving equipment on and feed back requests to turn off unused equipment to the staff. You should review the school’s standby policy with your ICT staff to ensure unused ICT equipment automatically goes into standby when not used for a short period e.g. 15 minutes. Consider replacing old ICT servers with modern servers or move to saving your school's data in the 'cloud'. Removing the need for school ICT servers can also save energy previously used for air conditioning in school server rooms.