£110m Squandered Heating Offices Over Xmas?

Make It Cheaper, the business price comparison service, has estimated that heating offices and leaving computers and other electrical equipment of stand-by could have cost UK businesses as much as £110 million over the 11-day Christmas period.

According to Make It Cheaper’s calculations, the average office consumes energy at the rate of 10 kilowatt hours (kWh) per employee per day when heated and all equipment running in standby mode. There are about 10 million office workers in the UK and business electricity costs some 10p per unit,. This equates to £10 million pounds a day being spent unnecessarily on 100 million kWh (100 gigawatt hours) which in turn is equivalent to an extra 54,000 tonnes of CO2 entering the atmosphere each day.

Said Jonathan Elliott, managing director of Make It Cheaper, “You only have to feel the heat of a mobile phone charger to know that it’s still sucking up electricity even when it’s not attached to your phone. And leaving a PC monitor on all night wastes enough energy to microwave six cold turkey dinners. With most office equipment, off doesn’t actually mean off anymore. Someone needs to take responsibility to turn the thermostat down and go to each wall socket and flick the switch or, better still, just unplug everything you don’t need. You’d be crackers not to.”