Keeping Costs Keen

Whichever way you look at it, says Quickslide’s MD Ben Weber, businesses should be taking greater responsibility for reducing their energy consumption to take care of the planet…and take care of costs to their customers. 

Like everyone else, our customers are feeling the pinch right now and so despite Quickslide just signing an energy renewal deal which sees our annual costs go from £200,000 a year to £600,000 a year, we’re being careful to do our best not to simply pass the added expense onto our customers.

 

Saving energy

Instead, we’re looking at all the ways we can cut our costs. It is crucial we save as much energy as we can across our business. We’ve invested about £100,000 on energy saving initiatives in the last nine months.

 

Knowledge is power

Energy reduction starts with knowing exactly where your energy usage is. At Quickslide the first thing we did was pin down exactly what we were using and where it was going. When we signed up for the next year with our energy provider we requested an hour-by-hour, day-by-day energy breakdown from them. This helped us identify our usage both for our costs and for the environmental impact.

We also completed a full independent ultrasonic air leak survey and had all the fixes put in place. And we’ve upgraded our compressors across the site to automatically adjusting variable speed compressors that are designed to save energy.

 

Every little counts

Once the information is gathered, it’s about making the right changes, both big and small. To quote a well-known supermarket, ‘every little counts’. Small changes made on a large scale across the whole business can make a real difference.

 

Light work

One example of this is how we’ve invested in renewing our LED lights across all our factories, moving from 250w bulbs to 150W. This small change translates into a direct saving when it comes to our energy usage and more light

 

Making the change

The trick is to identify what changes need to be made. Some of them, like lightbulbs, can then be quite simple to implement and the impact on costs can be seen immediately. Another directly measurable change we’ve made is to have voltage optimisers installed on all our incoming mains supplies.

When the electricity passes through, the supply voltage is reduced. By doing this we’ve made an 8% saving on our electricity. That’s 8% that would otherwise be wasted.

 

Gas

We’ve completed the upgrade of our factory gas heaters too. We now use a far more efficient model which we hope will see us saving 20% of the gas used in a particular production unit. In addition, interlocks fitted between the roller shutter doors and the gas heaters mean when the doors are open the heaters turn off, so we limit the amount of wasted heat.

 

Saving more than money

Of course, when it comes to energy usage what’s good for the purse strings is good for sustainability too. At Quickslide we pride ourselves on really trying to cut down on our carbon emissions. On our deliveries, for example, we’ve prioritised route mapping, trying to consolidate our delivery runs to make sure we’re not travelling any more additional miles than we need to.

We’ve tracked our total mileage so we can compare month by month over the last year. The results show a reduction every month on the year before, which represents a 10% carbon reduction overall, which is a great starting point.

We have started and will continue because we all need to do our bit for the sake of our customers, the planet and ultimately of course the future of our business.

 

Picture: Quickslide is managing energy costs in its factory and its fleet to do its bit for the environment and also to keep cost under control so they don’t have to be passed on to customers.

www.quickslide.co.uk

Article written by Cathryn Ellis
13th January 2023

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