Carbon Trust's Best Advice initiative

The free advice on offer is available in one of two ways. For businesses spending over £50,000 a year on energy, the Carbon Trust provides in-depth, on-site surveys, conducted by an accredited surveyor. The surveyor assesses every aspect of energy consumption, from heating, lighting and IT, to core plant machinery. For businesses spending less than £50,000 a year on energy, the Carbon Trust offers free advice through an online tutorial, available at www.carbontrust.co.uk/onlinetraining. The video tutorial provides easy-to-follow advice on how business can cut energy bills and save money. It helps users calculate the savings they can make at their workplace and develop an action plan to achieve them. Both of these services are free of charge, and will provide you with a clear, practical action plan to start reducing your costs almost immediately through simple, low cost and no cost measures. The Best Advice campaign is supported by the BCC and some of the UK's most successful business luminaries including Ian Cheshire, Group CEO of Kingfisher and Dawn Gibbins MBE, CEO, Barefoot, who feel that expert energy efficiency guidance is the best free advice available to help businesses in 2010. The Carbon Trust has offered the following advice to set you off on the carbon and energy saving journey: The simple seven steps: Make the switch • You could cut your lighting costs by as much as 15%, just by making sure you turn lights off in rooms and corridors that aren't being used. This can also be achieved by using sensors that can turn off lights automatically when not in use. Lighten up • Replacing high wattage filament lamps or tungsten halogen lamps with compact fluorescent lamps or metal halide lamps will give energy savings of 65-75% Don't turn up the heating unless you really need to • Excessive heating can be a major cost burden for businesses, during milder months try to keep your thermostat at 19°C. By reducing your thermostat by just one degree you can reduce heating costs by eight per cent. Tea time • It is cheaper to provide a kettle for staff who work outside normal business hours than to continue to run a drinks vending machine during these times Standby for savings • A single computer and monitor left on 24 hours a day will cost over £50 a year. Switching them off out of hours and enabling standby features could reduce this to £15 a year each and prolong the lifespan of equipment Wasted air = wasted cash • From car spray paint booths to pneumatic drills, many firms make use of compressed air, but air leaking through small holes is a common problem. A single 3mm hole can cost businesses nearly £700 per year in energy costs A climate for saving • Air conditioning can double a building's energy consumption and associated carbon emissions. To help reduce costs, make sure your air conditioning doesn't operate below 24°C.