Case Studies

How Business Gas helped a school to monitor and manage their Gas usage - and save money!

Featherstone high school is a leading, high profile secondary school with well over 1500 pupils in attendance. In terms of buildings, they boast a new 6th form development, two other classroom complexes, a leisure centre and comprehensive outdoor sports facilities. They approached us to install a gas smart meter, enabling them to see first hand their gas consumption.

Before we began their program, the school used roughly 1.7 million kWh per annum and the school was concerned that it was projected to reach 2.2 million kWh within just one year.

Their annual gas consumption at that time was costing them £39000 and they were understandably concerned about it’s inevitable rise to £50000 if left.

To make matters worse, gas prices were forecast to increase and this could well have put a critical strain on budgets.

Once we had begun their program, we noticed a key potential issue in that multiple boilers were servicing different areas of the school. Obviously, replacing the existing boilers with more efficient ones could have helped but we felt it was important to examine the current consumption patterns, enabling us to understand where they may be losing money unnecessarily.

Our initial visit to the school enabled us to gather the relevant data. The school’s gas and electricity processes were identified and the key procurement officer worked hand in hand with our team to establish an ongoing reporting regime.

With this data in our grasp, our energy management consultants gave recommendations to install both gas and electricity smart meter reporting as quickly as possible. We were able to implement this in under 6 weeks.

Once this was done, it quickly became clear that there were several anomalies in the consumption patterns. The overriding discovery was of the high level of consumption between the hours of midnight and 6am, when demand is lowest. We went on to discover, after continued monitoring, that there were unreasonable levels of consumption over the weekend. Again when demand is normally low.