“We can do better than that:” The small workplace fixes that can deliver huge energy bill savings

A Kiwi company is on a mission to show Australian and New Zealand businesses how making a bunch of minor changes and fixes around the workplace can deliver huge savings to energy costs.

It’s not’s not about installing shiny new kit, or applying complicated energy management systems, but rather knowing where to look and what to look for. Because tracking down and fixing operational inefficiencies can shave 10-30 per cent from an overall energy bill, which for some companies adds up to hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

“Things that we see is compressed air leakage all over the place. If you can hear a compressed air leak as you wander around your factory, it’s probably costing you around $2,000 or $3,000 minimum per year,” says DETA Consulting managing director Jonathan Pooch.  

“If you see steam leaks or water leaks, those sorts of things that are easy to walk past and easy to say ‘that’s a maintenance item’…but very rarely do we see the cause and effect on how much this is costing me.”

For “near no” capital cost, but a bit more human effort and some organisational change, a company can save serious cash, Pooch tells the Solar Insiders podcast.

“Lots of it is just behaviour. When we start things up, when we turn things off, and some basic maintenance things.

“Insulation is one thing that I see all the time. How many refrigerated insulation pipes have ice around the outside of it? Lots and lots all over Australia, all over New Zealand, how much hot water pipe work is not insulated and it’s too hot to touch? That is a problem that is heat loss, and we can do better than that.”

Change is good

But this low-hanging fruit requires people to be open to change and willing to let go of ideas drilled into them decades ago. One is that lights, and electric motors, are more efficient if they’re left on. 

Pooch says unless you’re flicking the lights on and off every 10 seconds, you’re not losing any efficiency by, say, turning them off when you leave the room. The same goes for electric motors, to a certain extent. 

Once the basics are done, the next level of savings comes from changing how the business is run. 

Little changes, such as thinking about when to run a particular process, can add up when they are all lined up together, Pooch says. 

“Lots of the setpoints for refrigeration are geared around optimising the operator maintenance or the call outs. And so the question is, by doing that, you’re running the system very conservatively. If the compromise on energy efficiency is $1,000 that might be the right option. But if it’s $100,000 [it is],” he says.

“We walk around plants at night as part of the work that we do, and often there’s stuff that’s left on all night. If we’re not operating, does the boiler really need to be on? And it is surprising how often business-as-usual is is actually not as energy efficient as it could be.

“It’s that same thing in a residential sense as well. Lots of us have this mindset that we should leave our heat pumps on all the time at home, but the reality is, unless we’re turning them on every six to eight seconds, we should always turn them off, from an energy efficiency perspective.

“And so I think there’s this latent kind of misunderstanding, I guess, around energy efficiency and the value of energy.”

Australia has better buildings, NZ is more efficient

Unsurprisingly, the advice for a site in Australia can be radically different to one in New Zealand: the former has floods of cheap solar power during the day and relatively accessible gas, the latter has a gas shortage and more focus on energy efficiency. 

Pooch says Australia’s NABERS building standards mean its commercial buildings are “significantly better” than those in New Zealand, which also need more heating because of the climate. 

The flip side is in the industrial sector, particularly food and agriculture, where the focus is still not yet on energy but on the final product. 

“New Zealand is further ahead on reducing energy demand and looking at energy efficiency, and the main reason for that is because of the government focus,” Pooch says.

“The underlying energy cost in Australia has been lower than New Zealand, so some of the economics and the drive for focus on efficiency has been a little bit more in New Zealand, just because of pure economics.”

Australia’s wealth of solar power during the day, which sometimes pushes wholesale prices negative, is an asset that changes the advice a little towards load shifting some processes to use that ultra-cheap energy.

Energy sovereignty is a business issue

The Iran war is making energy sovereignty a live issue, as fuel prices rocket as high as $2.77 at one Thomastown, Melbourne petrol station according to the PetrolSpy website.

But with gas shortages and very high wholesale prices in New Zealand, and volatile energy prices in Australia, thinking about energy as a variable cost rather than a fixed one is becoming an existential issue for companies as well, Pooch says. 

He cited a greenhouse in New Zealand that was using coal as a heat source. When coal became unavailable it was a case of change, or go out of business.

“They had to tackle it in a systematic way, in a practical way. Otherwise, without being more productive, that organisation wasn’t going to survive. And I think we are going to see that more and more,” he said.

“Unless we’re all comfortable paying twice as much for tomatoes or lettuces or whatever it is in the supermarket, [companies] need to be much more efficient.”

Listen to the Solar Insiders Podcast interview with Jonathan Pooch, here.

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