What do we mean by long term electricity use?
Tracking long term trends in your school's electricity use can help you to monitor your overall progress towards reducing your electricity costs and carbon emissions.
What to look for
Viewing your electricity use over a whole year or more can help identify any seasonal variations in your usage and do forward planning.
- Over the long term, electricity use at a school should be downwards. Unless the school has additional buildings added, if you are managing your electricity consumption well; more modern ICT equipment, LED lighting and behavioural change all contribute to reducing electricity use.
- Carbon dioxide emissions should show a greater long term downward trend as the UK electricity grid is being decarbonised, with more and more electricity being generated by renewable sources each year.
Common causes of high electricity consumption
- Inefficient lights and lights left switched on in empty rooms
- Security lights running constantly through the night
- Electric room heaters
- Electric water heaters running constantly
- Inefficient IT servers
- Old freezers and fridges running constantly
- Hot drink boilers
- Water chillers
- Air conditioning
- Photocopiers and printers
- Computers, iPad and laptop chargers, smart boards, and projectors
- Music technology equipment
- Design technology equipment
- Extraction fans and fume cupboards
- Air purifiers introduced as Covid mitigation
What you should do
- Make sure you switch off lights and electrical equipment on a daily basis. Use a sticker system to empower pupils to turn off lights and equipment. Green stickers mean pupils can switch off. Amber means to ask a teacher first. Red means only adults can switch off.
- Use our switch-off checklists before the holidays:
- Use appliance monitors to understand the energy use of electrical equipment. Don't forget to check fridges and freezers as these need to run all the time. A modern fridge or freezer uses less than £100 of electricity a year, but old models can use over £500 of electricity a year.
- Install timers on photocopiers and printers so they automatically switch off at the end of the day.
- Install timers on electric room and water heaters to make sure they are not left running overnight, at the weekend, and during the holidays.
- Consider replacing your lights with energy-saving LED lights. Often only the bulb needs replacing, and LED bulbs or tubes are now available cheaply. LEDs can save up to 90% of energy costs compared to halogen bulbs, and up to 50% compared to fluorescent tubes. This change can either be done piecemeal by replacing a few bulbs at a time, when your existing fluorescent tubes or bulbs stop working or on a more wholesale basis across the whole school. You may be able to get grant funding or an interest-free loan (such as SALIX) for this work, or you might be able to get your PTA or a similar parent group to fundraise to support the project.
- Consider replacing old ICT servers with modern servers or move to save 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.
- Replace desktop computers with laptop computers. Older desktop computers often consume 2 to 3 times more electricity than laptops