Switch off

Susie Diamond, building physics engineer, Fulcrum Consulting

At Fulcrum, we’re running a competition for employees to come up with an incentive reward, the value of which will be linked to annual cost of the savings made by the company. We are proposing a number of ideas such as buying plug-in energy monitors to work out consumption of various office appliances; switching off boiling water dispensers at night – we’ll just have to wait while they heat up in the mornings; turning off all the lights – we have big windows and it’s bright enough without them; and cutting food miles travelled by the office ‘daily fruit’. Each employee will be asked to complete a simple spreadsheet to work out their annual carbon emissions due to travel and domestic use.

Katie Lingwood, architectural assistant at GHM Rock Townsend

We bought some devices to monitor the consumption of items like pcs, laptops, phone chargers and plotters. We found the most significant users were the pcs and the kettle. We’re asking people to switch off their computers at lunchtime or if they go out of the office for meetings and we’re on the look-out for an ‘eco kettle’. We’ve got high windows at our offices; at the moment we’re keeping the lights switched off, but we’re also planning a refurbishment soon and one of the plans is to look at the lights with a view to having individual switching for the perimeter lights.

Sam Pilcher, programme co-ordinator for environmental management at KPMG

We’ve got 22 UK offices and have begun by setting up a utilities steering group with representatives from all the departments to come up with a plan of action. We’re looking at all utilities including water, and we’ve appointed a firm to carry out monitoring reports for all our offices which our FM teams will be able to access online.

We already source 90% of our electricity from green tariffs but as an office it can be quite difficult for staff to have an impact on how much is used, and so we’re using this campaign to raise awareness.

United Business Media, Dermot Hughes, account manager ISS Coflex

Here at BSj we’ve also joined the campaign. As part of CMP Information, we’re based at Ludgate House on the south side of Blackfriars bridge. Using the billing data and half-hourly meter readings, we’ve already established that our base load is around 250 kWh with peaks of up to 600-700 kWh. The building’s landlord, United Business Media, has got buy-in from the building’s tenants and the FM team has already started with a banner campaign in reception, plus poster and email alerts. As well as the awareness campaign, we’re putting initiatives in place to encourage staff to turn off small power equipment at night/weekends, close blinds before leaving in the evening to prevent early morning solar gains and turn off lights. The FM team is looking to alter plant set times, such as switching off air-conditioning one hour early each night and turning it on half an hour later each morning. In the coming weeks, we’ll also be getting an energy consultant in to do an audit of the building and make suggestions about what else can be improved.

Simon Tilleard, head of engineering, Natural History Museum

For us, it’s going to be more about the awareness campaign. We already have in place a good monitoring system. The museum has around 69 million specimens stored in our collections building which requires close control 24 hours a day, so we’re very focused on energy efficiency. However, one thing we will be doing is looking at our display lighting and running a number of pilot projects to relight some galleries with newer technologies and assess the energy savings.

John Barker, business development manager at Capita Symonds

We’ve got 45 offices in the UK, but to start with we are going to try this out in just three and come up with a blueprint that we can roll out across our other offices. One person in each office is going to take responsibility for doing the energy measurements, filling out the TM22 documents and implementing the programme. We’ve begun with a global email to all 3000 staff explaining what the campaign is and what we’re trying to achieve. Initially we will be looking for easy wins such as switching off lights, pcs and microwaves, which won’t need any investment. After this we will look at further measures we can take.