Energy audit: finding the waste before buying anything

An energy audit establishes where a building or operation actually uses energy, rather than where people assume it does. The assumption is usually lighting and heating; the reality is frequently a single piece of equipment running when nobody is there, a control setting nobody has looked at since installation, or a door that has been propped open for two years. The value is in finding those before spending money on anything.

What an energy audit covers

• Twelve months of actual consumption from bills and meter readings, which is the baseline everything else is measured against.
• The major users: heating, cooling, refrigeration, compressed air, process equipment, lighting, in that rough order of surprise.
• When energy is used, not just how much — out-of-hours consumption is where the cheapest savings hide.
• Control settings and schedules, which drift and are rarely revisited after commissioning.
• The building fabric, where that is within your power to change rather than the landlord's.
• Tariffs and standing charges, since paying the wrong rate is an avoidable cost with no engineering required.

The cheap wins that come up repeatedly

Equipment running outside operating hours is the commonest and costs nothing to fix. After that: heating and cooling fighting each other in the same space, set points wider apart than anybody intended, compressed air leaks that are audible during a quiet walk round, lighting in areas nobody occupies, and refrigeration with blocked condensers. None of these require investment, and together they typically account for more than any single capital project would save. An audit that leads straight to a quotation for new equipment has skipped the part that pays for itself.

Walk the site outside working hours before reading any report. Half an hour on a Sunday evening tells you more about out-of-hours waste than a week of analysis, because everything still running then is running for no reason anybody can defend.

Why the report alone changes nothing

1. Pick two or three actions rather than accepting a list of forty, which is a way of doing none of them.
2. Give each one an owner and a date, since nothing in an audit report happens by itself.
3. Record the baseline consumption before the change, or you will not be able to show it worked.
4. Measure again after a full cycle of the same season, because comparing a mild month with a cold one proves nothing.
5. Re-audit the controls annually; settings drift back whenever equipment is serviced or replaced.

Keeping the evidence

Consumption data, the audit itself, the actions taken and the results afterwards belong together, because the questions arrive later and from several directions: a landlord, a customer asking about emissions in a tender, a certification scheme, or simply next year's budget. A company that can show a baseline and a trend is in a very different position from one that can only show intentions, and the difference is a handful of readings recorded monthly rather than any extra effort.

Ettex Records holds the meter readings, the audit document and the action list with owners and dates, so the trend is a chart rather than a reconstruction from old bills. Where customers ask about emissions, that same baseline is what the wider sustainability reporting has to rest on.