As your business grows, you’re seeing increasing costs in your electricity bill. The larger the costs get, the more critical it becomes to manage them.

Follow these tips for immediate short-term savings and long-term strategies for consistent financial gains to hack your bill and save money.

1. Stop putting off that LED lighting project.
   LED replacements are low-hanging fruit with potential rebate opportunities, and the ROI is quick. And, you can start adding sensors to reduce light usage right now! 
   
2. Consider adding motion or light sensors to reduce lighting needs when the room is not in use or when there is a lot of natural light coming through the windows.
   
3. Change your work schedules to avoid working and using energy from 1 pm to 7 pm.
   A schedule change is significant for manufacturers who can change entire production lines’ time and reduce power loads during peak hours.
   
4. If you have the capability, run an alternate generator for a few hours to take the load off of the grid.
   
5. Install automatic sequencers to avoid powering on all your equipment simultaneously.
   Powering on all your gear simultaneously will spike your energy usage. 
   
6. Look into other ways to cool your building during the summer, like thermal energy storage systems. 
   
7. See if you qualify for a demand response program.
   Demand response is a program from your supplier that will pay you cash to reduce your energy during a peak demand day. Our last customer to sign up received over $100,000 the first year they were on the program. 
   
8. Lease or purchase energy-efficient office equipment.
   
9. Check the efficiency of your copiers and office electronics; if they are not ENERGYSTAR-rated from the last few years, it might be time to upgrade.
   
10. Bonus Office Equipment Tip:
    Turn off any office equipment, like printers and computers, not needed between 2 pm and 7 pm. 
    
11. Deploy an energy monitoring system.
    Adding a building monitoring system that tracks and displays business areas and times of day where energy usage spikes can help inspire more energy efficiency behaviors from the top down. Visually showing employees how they can help be more efficient encourages further efficiency innovations and allows employees to have ownership over new efficiency policies and procedures.
    
12. Turn off lights when not needed.
    It seems like a no-brainer, but lights are left on in areas like break rooms, bathrooms, and conference rooms in many businesses, even when not in use. Adding occupancy and daylight harvesting sensors can reduce energy usage by up to 40%.
    
13. Adjust the thermostat:
    For commercial settings, we would mainly recommend setting a schedule that saves energy when no one is in the building and heats or cools during business hours only to a reasonably comfortable level.