How Commercial Businesses Can Reduce Costs on Cooling

Summer is a high season for a lot of people and businesses. It’s great for tourism, restaurants, travel agencies, and so on. It’s also a high season for us technicians…which can be a problem for commercial businesses who need help with their cooling.

Did you know there are a few ways you can cut down on cooling costs at your company? Depending on what kind of business you run, cooling solutions are a necessary part of keeping your business running, but you do have to strategize how these solutions are applied in order to keep costs low despite the high season. If you need to cut down on cooling costs, here are some tips on how to do so for your commercial business.

Tip 1: Get an energy audit conducted

While this tip may not sound like a good idea at all, it actually really is when it comes to figuring out your business’s energy costs and usage. An audit can properly measure how much money and energy you are using currently, and they are usually offered for free to business owners from most utility companies. They can help you find out how to better increase your energy efficiency, where your money is going every month, and how and where you can make adjustments to lower those energy bills.

Tip 2: Ask yourself some hard questions

While you’re waiting for your energy audit to be fully completed, you need to really take a look at how you’re currently using your cooling efforts for your business. Asking yourself these tough questions can perhaps illuminate just how badly you need to make changes around the company:

• Is the air conditioning switched on all day, every day during the summer?
• Are you or have you been doing anything already to minimize or eliminate the need for an A/C unit?
• What type of atmosphere are your employees most comfortable in?
• Are there any cooling alternatives you can provide your staff when moving forward?
• Do your current cooling solutions feel like they’re enough, or not?

All of these questions and more are essential ones you should be asking when looking to change the way you cool down your building and the way you spend energy to get that result. If you weren’t aware of these questions to start with, then you really need to re-examine exactly how you’ve lost track of keeping track. Not only could you be adding unnecessary costs to your budget to cooling, but also you could be unwittingly causing a serious negative impact on the environment in and out of your business’s building.

Once you’ve analyzed these questions and examined your audit, you can determine how best to approach cooling solutions for your business.

Tip 3: Keep your commercial HVAC tuned up and clean

This tip is an obvious one, but since we’ve seen some ugly mistakes made with it in the past (there are a few examples we mean here), it bears repeating. You really will save money, time, and energy by performing regular maintenance and cleaning your commercial HVAC, whether it’s a fridge or an air conditioner.

Change the filters as often as recommended, and keep all furniture and obstacles such as paper away from the vents. Hiring a technician and coming up with a regular schedule for HVAC tasks helps too; they can perform more in-depth maintenance that neither you nor your staff have time to tend to as often as recommended.

Tip 4: Keep the heat out

Perhaps your commercial HVAC is working fine, but you’re still losing money. Have you checked the windows? You may not think the sunlight coming into your conference room window is a big deal, but really that’s money and energy flying out of your building right there, because it’s adding to your air conditioner’s efforts to cool a room down.

Another thing to be wary of in terms of windows are drafts. Yes, these are more noticeable when it’s cold out and the heat is escaping, but those same weaknesses in the windows are also letting cold air escape when you need it!

These are very easy fixes that you can’t ignore. All you have to do is add or replace awnings, solar screen window shades, and high-reflectivity window films to reduce the amount of heat. For those pesky drafts, replace or add to your windows caulk, weather-stripping, or foam. We’re sure you’ll start to feel a difference in temperature once you apply these fixes!

Tip 5: Consider smart programming

Smart thermostats and similar programming aren’t just useful for homeowners and their HVAC. This tech can benefit anyone at the office or in the commercial building where cooling solutions are needed. With a smart thermostat, you will have the power to adjust the temperature of the workplace when no one is around (for example holidays, weekends, and most nights).

You can set it to turn the A/C on before people arrive and off before they leave for the day. Just turning your A/C up by 1 degree in the summer can actually reduce the power you use (remember, the higher the temperature your cooling needs to be, the harder the system will work to achieve it).

Tip 6: Trees can be your friends

If there’s enough property outside to help with this, then trees can be a real benefit to your business. Plant some outside the office and provide your building with some shaded landscaping. The trees and their leaves will filter some of the harshness of the sun’s rays and less cooling via HVAC will be needed. If your building already has proper energy efficient systems and insulation, though, the effect of the trees will be a lot smaller.

These are only a few suggestions as to how to keep your commercial business’s cooling costs to a minimum in the warmer weather months. If your company needs assistance applying these solutions at any time, or your commercial air conditioner needs replacing or repairing, give us a call. At Rep-Air Heating And Cooling we provide our customers with many options that will best suit your needs from heating and cooling to refrigeration. Contact us today for your complimentary quote: 1-778-728-1476 or contact@repairheatingandcooling.com and don’t forget to take a look at our website: https://repairheatingandcooling.com. Follow us on Facebook and Instagram for free giveaways!