What's the Highest Controllable Cost in Your Building?
Within a building’s operating costs, rent and payroll are effectively fixed. Energy is one
of the only lines an estates or facilities team can actually influence, and on average,
around 30% of the energy used in commercial buildings is wasted.
This waste is usually invisible on a utility bill. Most buildings only track total
consumption, not where that consumption is going, so the inefficiency accumulates
quietly, day after day, without anyone seeing it.
Below, we go through where that waste tends to come from, which retrofit measures
give the fastest return, and how to check that any change you make is actually working.
Out-of-hours operation is the biggest blind spot
The most common source of waste is simple: HVAC heating or cooling empty rooms,
lighting left on overnight or over weekends, ventilation running at full capacity with no
one in the building, and plant left on by default rather than by need. This is the result of
running a building on fixed schedules rather than actual occupancy.
Heating and cooling can work against each other
Where temperature setpoints are set too tight, heating and cooling systems can end up
fighting each other: the heating kicks in as soon as a room dips slightly below setpoint,
and the cooling responds just as fast when it creeps slightly above.
Faults the BMS doesn’t catch
A BMS can keep reporting normal status long after the physical equipment it is
monitoring has stopped responding properly. A degraded valve, for example, can
quietly reduce a system’s thermal efficiency for months. Without visibility across the
whole estate rather than a single plant room, these faults are very difficult to catch.
Retrofitting existing buildings can cut embodied and operational carbon significantly
compared with constructing the same building from scratch, but not every
improvement needs to be a huge spend. Here are some low upfront cost, but high
return retrofit options.
Where the fastest returns are:
HVAC scheduling
The most immediate way to reduce energy costs in commercial buildings is through
HVAC scheduling optimisation. Aligning system operation with actual occupancy
patterns and weather data typically delivers the quickest return with minimal effort,
often reducing energy consumption by 10–30% within the first few months.
Reducing heat loss
Heating is usually the largest single energy cost in a non-domestic building, therefore
representing a large saving opportunity. Sealing unused doors and windows, excluding
emergency exits, and insulating hot water tanks, boilers and pipework are both low-
cost and typically have a short payback period.
LED retrofits
LED lighting uses significantly less energy than incandescent or CFL bulbs and can run
for 50,000 to 100,000 hours. Where LED retrofits haven’t happened yet, they remain one
of the simplest wins available.
Measuring what actually changes
None of this is worth doing without a way to check it worked. That means establishing a
baseline before any change, defining KPIs such as energy use intensity and savings
percentage, and using real-time monitoring rather than periodic manual readings.
What makes these issues worth addressing is that none of them require major retrofit
works to resolve. They are operational, and they stay hidden mainly because estates
teams do not have the day-to-day capacity to find them without the right visibility
across the building.
xWatts gives estates and energy teams that visibility, and the automated control to act
on it, without adding to their workload.
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Start Saving with xWatts
Speak to our team to find out how we can help you cut costs now