Blog Posts tagged ‘office’

Earlier this year we moved into a larger office to give everyone a bit more space. Knowing we’d be here for at least the next 3 years we decided to see what we could do to reduce the impact of our activities.

Energy Assesment

This was our first step, to know where power was being used:

The section titled “Office” represents usage from power outlets, predominantly office workstations and internal servers. We still haven’t found where our shop is, but according to our energy auditor it only uses 0.4% of power so we didn’t look too hard for it.

In NSW, the Energy Efficiency for Small Business Program can assist with the cost of energy assessements as well as contributions of up to $5000 towards the cost changes that you make to reduce your energy consumption.

100% Green Power

Our daily power consumption when we first moved in was over 200kWh/day, that’s nearly 10 times the typical Australia home. Whilst we took steps to reduce this we couldn’t eliminate it so we purchased 100% Green Power.

Lighting

The office started with 140 fluorescent tubes, of these we disabled around 50 tubes in areas that either received adequate levels of natural light, weren’t being used, or the people sitting below them were creatures of the dark. In many fittings we found that one of the two tubes provided an adequate and sometimes a more comfortable level of light for the area being lit.

The remaining 90 or so we replaced with Phillips LED tubes reducing power consumption by 50%.

Turning off workstations

Everyone now either turn off or put their office workstations into sleep mode (most of the time). We built a script to enable reporting on which workstations had been left on for enforcement.

No bottled water

Having someone deliver water on the back of a diesel powered truck when we had a tap in the office seemed quite counter-intuitive. We realised most of what we enjoyed about the water dispenser was that it was cold and filtered. We replaced the water that was previously being delivered by truck to a plumbed dispenser with a water filter.

Re-usable take away coffee cups

 
We bought a few hundred of these from Keep Cup, gave most of them away to our customers and kept the rest for office use.

Indoor plants

Our initial attempts at office plants was somewhat of a failure, most of the plants died due to lack of water. So we automated the plant supply and watering, 6 months on our new batch of plants are all still alive.

Other changes we’re considering:

• Gradual shift to increased use of low power workstations or laptops over traditional workstations
• Installation of a power monitoring device such as a Wattson or SEGmeter
• Talk to our landlords about reducing water consumption in bathroom amenities