Restaurants use a lot of electricity. Be it for cooking, refrigerating, baking, lighting up the kitchen and dining areas, air conditioning and more, a restaurant uses many watts of electricity on a single day. While it cannot entirely stop using energy to reduce the carbon footprint, a restaurant can certainly adopt methods and measures for reducing energy use on the whole. Here are a few ways in which you can reduce energy consumption in your restaurant.
Get an energy audit
The first step to reducing your energy use to get an assessment of your overall energy consumption. Get an energy consultant to inspect and assess how much energy is being used in your restaurant. An energy audit will help you pinpoint the electrical appliances and equipment that are consuming the most energy and increasing your costs.
A thorough assessment will also be able to help you understand how and where you are unnecessarily using energy and how you can reduce wastage.
Set goals
Once you figure out how and where you are wasting energy, you can set goals to bring down consumption by that measure. Set specific goals that you can actually achieve without hurting the day-to-day operations of your restaurant. Replace old equipment with energy efficient ones, which not only save money but also make your restaurant an eco-friendly one.
Make a list of things you should and should not do to reduce energy consumption in your restaurant and also set a deadline by which you must achieve the goal of reducing energy consumption.
Evaluate progress
Making goals alone isn’t enough. You have to keep a track of your progress in terms of bringing down the amount of energy you use on a day. Make a record of the equipment you have and also of which appliances you use more and which you can avoid using unnecessarily to reduce costs. At the end of the day, or a week, see if a particular strategy has worked for you. You can also talk to your energy consultant about strategies to reduce the use of electricity.
Stay committed
The most important thing to do for reducing the energy consumption in your restaurant is to recognize the kind of economic and environmental impact that your energy use has. As long as you keep in mind that by reducing the amount of energy used you are not only saving yourself hundreds of dollars or even more in a month, but also doing your bit to protect Mother Nature and reduce the carbon emissions, you will be able to stay committed to energy audits.
Make smart and efficient use of energy a way of life in your restaurant. If you are committed, you will get the necessary support not just form your staff but also from your customers.
