A Short Chat About Your Electric Bill

With the electrical costs for laundries rising and soaring upward at a scary pace, it is now more essential than ever to do everything reasonable to keep energy consumption at the lowest level. Following are just a few tips for operators to consider to keep electric power usage under control. Are windows at the front of your laundry business covered with signs or screens that block out natural sunlight? Laundries will do better when their customers can see out and prospective customers can clearly see in to look and see just how bright and cheerful that laundry can be. Clearing the windows of needless signs and bulletins could significantly cut back on energy costs. In many laundries, lights are kept on, even during daylight hours, to keep the laundry more inviting and cheerful for customers. Carefully consider whether or not the same results can be obtained with fewer lights by using more reflective paint and creating a brighter decor. Inside the laundry, is the paint on the walls light enough to reflect light and brighten up the place? Is your laundry one of the many that features paneling on the walls that may be too dark to really reflect light? In laundries that feature a long narrow design, the natural light coming through the front windows during the day may not effectively reach the rear portion of the customer space, requiring use of lights at the back all day long. Some mitigate that affect by using light colors, or even using reflective material like stainless steel panels on the back wall. Interior design people call it bringing the back forward by making it a brighter image than that at the front. This creates a cheerful look, while costs for lighting are held down. It''s cost effective to spend a little money now redecorating to allow reduced lighting costs during daylight hours. As energy costs rise further, it will prove to be a better and better investment in your laundry. How old are your lights? Replacing old T-12 tubes with newer T-8 tubes can cut the costs of fluorescent lighting by as much as 15 to 24 percent. It will require installing new ballasts and tubes or replacing everything with entirely new fixtures. But, it will pay for itself in just a few years based on today''s energy costs. As those costs rise, your savings get larger. If laundry lighting is controlled with timers, they must be set for the right times of day to go on and off. Too many operators have timers set once then never readjust them to match daylight saving hours. If the lights come on at 6:00 AM instead of 7:00, or run an hour too long at night, it adds about 8% to your lighting bill. Many laundries run a full string of their fluorescent tubes for night time instead of installing security lighting. This may be wasteful as smaller energy savings lights will do the same job and do it at a lower cost. The purpose of security lights is to illuminate the laundry so that it can be observed from the outside. Consider if that job can be done more effectively with fewer lights. The purpose of this advice is not to make the laundry darker during business hours. It''s to make it lit more efficiently during those times of day the laundry is not open. Night lighting is simply for security. You want your business open to the eyes of police and all passersby at night so they can look in. That way they''ll be able to see in and notice if there is anything untoward going on. Anything an operator can do to lower his or her energy costs will pay off more and more over the years, as energy costs will not go down, but continue to accelerate higher. The best advice is to think constantly about how to lower utility costs. Every penny saved is a gift to the bottom line, and that gift will keep on giving back more and more, as utility costs rise. And according to every laundry expert laundry owners can consult, future predictions tell of gas, water and electric costs continuing to rise. Do all you can to keep them as low as you can. One of the founding fathers of our country, Ben Franklin, said ''A penny saved is a penny earned.'' Everything that a laundry operator can do to save those pennies will become earned money. Gas, water and electric. Save, save, save