High-tech kit will help cut bills

New energy-saving equipment is on order, and will cut electricity bills at the offices of the Council and Somer Housing.

Two portable high-tech devices will soon be delivered to B&NES Council and the offices of Somer Housing as part of Our Big Energy Challenge’s capital investment. The state-of-the-art monitoring and logging equipment will help both sites keep a close eye on their electricity use, understand when and where demand is highest and identify where savings can be made.

The cost of the kit – around £2000 for each unit – will be met by the Treasury’s ‘Invest to Save Budget’ a fund set up to support projects that will bring about improvements in public services.

The equipment enables maintenance engineers to monitor both the electricity consumption and operating cost of a building’s lighting, computer equipment, air conditioning systems etc by manually clipping sensors onto the electricity cables and then measuring the rate of consumption over a given period of time.

Ken Gale from the Our Big Energy Challenge team said, “The data-logger is a supurb energy management tool which will enable the Council and the Somer Housing to quickly identify and eliminate wasteful practises within their commercial and public service buildings".