energy wastage – Enviro-Mentalist

Compressor Survey

As I mentioned in my last post, I am trying to reduce the energy usage at work by looking at the process equipment. The first piece(s) of equipment to fall under the spotlight was the compressor. Although maintenance did not want to change any of the settings they did arrange for someone from the Company who installed and services the compressors to come in and talk to me about them (although maintenance were conspicuously absent from the meeting).

The outcome of the meeting was that we had a set of dataloggers installed to look at the air usage over a week. From that we received a report detailing the loads during the week, the cost of generating the air, the annual cost of the air, and a number of recommendations for saving energy and money. It is hoped that when faced with the hard data, then maintenance and management would decide that changes needed to be made.

The first of the recommendations was to use only one compressor, not only would this save us electricity costs in excess of £1000 per year, but would also save £250 a year in servicing costs. This might not have been an economically viable option if it wasn’t for the fact that the pipework is already in place and all we have to do it turn a valve on. So, from this, another question arises – why do we have a separate compressor? The second plant was installed in 2001, 15 years after the first plant – why not use the same compressor? There is no one in the Company that can answer this question – so, as maintenance cannot think of a good reason not to do this, the valve will be opened and both plants monitored to check that there is no problem. The specification of the main compressor and the air requirements of the main plant are such that it can easily provide enough air for both plants. Money saved.

Second recommendation? You’ve guessed it, turn the pressure down – apparently a one bar reduction in pressure will save £185 per year. You might think that this is not much of a saving, but at 10p per kWh, it is equivalent to 1 tonne of CO2e per year, and it is all waste. I was a little disappointed that the survey could not tell me what my minimum operating pressure is, but as far as I can tell, as long as I keep above 6bar, then the second plant will be fine, and if I do reduce the pressure below the minimum for the main plant then it will just stop – which is not a disaster, we just turn the pressure back up and start it up again – as long as it is in a controlled way no damage will be done.

Recommendation three was something I am not sure about – there is the possibility of recovering the heat generated by the compressor and using it to heat the warehouse. However, the figures were based on the cost of electrical heating, gas is about 20% of the cost of electricity at the moment, and we do not want heat all year round. This suggestion is parked for now.

The final suggestion is to conduct a leak survey. Whilst we do check for leaks on a weekly basis, this is only done by listening for any leaks. It is possible that this is missed, and, if we are using the connecting pipework across the warehouse to power both plants it may be more worthwhile (expected cost £350). However, what is making me think that this could be worthwhile is that the survey showed the air usage graphically for the week. There were a couple of days where the main plant was shut down, and the air usage, whilst low, was not zero. Whilst there may be something that is kept under pressure when the plant is off, in which case maybe we can lock it off, it may be because of leaks in the system. I have estimated that if this was the case, then the cost of these leaks is £300 per annum.

So, I have the data, and although it cost £200 to get the survey done, we should be able to save up to £1500 a year for no outlay at all and we can have the changes made by the start of the CRCEE.

Switch Off Campaign

A decision was made at Head Office that a switch off campaign sounded like a good idea, so we (the Carbon Reduction steering committee) were told to organise one in our respective division. So, that will be easy then. After some debate as to what constituted a switch off campaign with a leading light thinking that it would involve lots of surveys and the appointment of green champions to look for energy saving opportunities, I finally got them to see sense and realise that it was just what it said on the tin: a campaign to raise awareness and get everyone switching things off when they were not in use. Back to the real world and the rush of the every day job kicked in and I did not really think about the switch off campaign.

A month later a reminder came out with a start date of 4th January. OK, so now I have a deadline, but still no guidance. So, what to do? I could email the Site Managers and tell them to organize a switch off campaign – that would work! I turned once more to my trusty friend Google and found a couple of bits of information, mainly from local councils who had jointly run just such a scheme and used these as the starting point for my ideas.

The first thing I did was make an action plan for the actual campaign which was to be over a two week period:

Energy measurements to be taken at the same time each week for two weeks before, during and after the campaign.
Site Managers to brief all of the staff about the campaign
Site Managers to conduct a walk around the site during the campaign and provide positive and negative feedback to staff
Staff to be encouraged to submit energy saving ideas

etc, etc. The action plan was emailed out to the Site Managers a couple of weeks before the start to give them a little advance warning. I have found that each of the seven sites we have is very different in size and culture, and so, one size does not necessarily fit all, so the Site Managers were the best people to decide how to get local buy-in.

Next on my list was to create some advertising material, something that would remind staff about the campaign and why they should be turning things off. So, back to Mr Google for some more helpful hints and tips, followed by a trip to an online stock photo site for some appropriate pictures (yes, I know that one of my other passions is photography, but I was in a hurry and did not have the appropriate props). A couple of late nights later and I had a series of posters for display at the sites detailing environmental facts and energy saving tips. You can view them here:

SWITCH IT OFF

If you would like to use them please feel free to download – just let me know – it is always interesting to see where others are in their quest for energy efficiency as well as being good for the ego.

OK, so now I needed a bribe for the energy saving ideas bit. I settled on the promise of a tree planted in the name of the person with the best idea or a box of chocolates – should appeal to a lot of people I thought.

The campaign ran with mixed success, I will outline the reasons for this, along with the results, in my next post.

Lighting in Daventry.

A while ago (as outlined in Lighting – do we have too much?) I started to look at the amount of lighting on our Daventry site. For various reasons it has taken some time to make any meaningful changes, but at last we are beginning to make some progress.

Surprising discovery number one – we had no light switches for a quarter of our warehouse – even when no one was around we had to leave 3kW of lights on. Whilst this is only for a small proportion of the year it is still waste. The lights were controlled by a photocell, unfortunately somewhere along the line a Health & Safety survey had declared that the lighting was insufficient and, instead of changing the levels the detectors were covered up. This meant that other than tripping the circuit breakers, the lights could not be switched off; even on the brightest of days.

The first step was therefore to sort this ridiculous state of affairs out. We have now installed some new photocells which can be changed remotely if the initial levels are incorrectly set. The payback time on this is less than 12 months even if the light is only bright enough to switch them off for 4 hours each day. The only fly in this ointment is that H&S police have again determined that the light levels initially set were incorrect, and, rather than resetting to the correct levels, they have been turned to permanently on! A task for the next week will be to sort this problem out.

Other areas have been identified where lights are left on for no reason. Despite being only a few fluorescent tubes (relatively small in number compared to the aforementioned warehouse) they still represent substantial savings. The first of these areas was the Plant room – visited only by maintenance staff, and therefore it should have been better controlled. Unfortunately, unless you are in the room you can’t tell whether the lights have been left on; it was estimated that there were about 158 hours of extra lighting each week in this area.

The second area is a small office in the middle of the warehouse that has no permanent occupant and is subsequently visited by various members of staff, none of whom appears to be capable of turning the light off when they leave. This 200W of lighting is left on unnecessarily for about 144 hours every week. The answer to both of these has been the addition of PIRs (Passive Infra Red detectors) – motion detectors. I think that you can get too carried away with motion detectors and see them as the answer to everything, but in some cases, for example when there are lots of different occupants using a room, only some whom will regularly turn the light off, they can be beneficial. Both of these projects had estimated payback times of less than 12 months.

The final change that has been made has been a no cost solution and is the most obvious. A member of the maintenance team was asked to survey the lighting of the entire site and, in addition to the number, type and power of the lights, estimate hours of use and the amount of wastage. As a consequence it occurred to him that one of the areas was visited for approximately 1 hour per week but that all three of the 70W tubes were on permanently. He was usually the only one to visit the room and has now promised to turn the lights off when the room is not in use, a saving of 1800kWh per year.

Other areas have been singled out as needing a motion detector – these include the toilets, the tea room and the locker room, but I am having less success in getting these fitted – it is starting to become a bit of a mission!

I have now started to look at the rest of the sites within the business unit as part of the requirements for our participation in the Carbon Reduction Commitment Energy Efficiency scheme (CRCEE) and have learnt more about lighting than I ever expected. Details to follow..

Energy Awareness at Work

One of the major problems highlighted as part of our energy audit was employee awareness of energy wastage. This was obvious just on the walk around when the number of lights and computers left on was visible to anyone with their eyes open. As a consequence, we were offered several one hour training sessions to try to raise the awareness of staff about the cost of leaving things switched on. This was sold to us on the basis that most people, even advocates of energy saving, don’t even think about saving energy at work and are often unaware of just how much leaving some devices on standby could be costing.

So, I organised three sessions for all the employees on site that day, and was impressed to see that everyone did turn up for the sessions. Only one person asked if they could miss it (I obviously said no as they are the biggest sceptic that I know and believe that climate change is just a government scare tactic to introduce more taxes). I also (admittedly a bit belatedly) sent an email to other departments and sites inviting them to send someone over if they wanted (I had only one response, and everyone else ignored me) – this is obviously not currently a priority within the Company – although I believe this may be about to change with the requirements for the Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC).

How did the training go? Well, it was not the most dynamic of deliveries I have ever come across. There were some interesting facts and figures about the cost of leaving appliances on standby, which did seem to be news to some people in the room, but other than that there did not seem to be very much content and certainly nothing that I thought would influence many people to change their habits. There was also a large concentration of effort about the Carbon Reduction Commitment, despite my assurances that there really was nothing that I could do about it at my lowly level. Maybe I was a little prejudiced though, because it wasn’t news to me, but apparently some people did not know that leaving their mobile on charge for longer than required was wasting money.

So, results of the training, no immediate effects were noticeable, although it did get some people talking about it. I have since discovered that more warehouse staff are turning lights off as they leave the room (I discovered this second hand due to a comment from maintenance that they are having to replace more bulbs). Most disappointing though is that people in the office are still leaving lights and IT equipment on – one of our biggest wastes of energy. So, although it did not change the world, it was probably worthwhile as it did what it said on the tin and raised employee awareness with regards to energy usage – now it is up to me to start getting them into new, better habits.