One of the biggest talking points of the year has been climate change. We’re all being encouraged to actively save energy and reduce our carbon footprint. But with Winter fast approaching, we’re all going to be using more energy. So how can you make your property more energy efficient through winter?

Reducing draught around doors and windows

Draughts occur through small unwanted gaps around the edges of a door or window. They allow cold air into the property and warm air to escape, causing you to use more energy keeping the property warm. For gaps around the bottom of the door you can fit a brush or hinged flap draught excluder. For gaps around windows, you can buy self-adhesive foam strips. Both these methods will help to keep warm air in and cold air out.

Insulating your door

As steel doors are manufactured from 2 ‘skins’ bonded together, there is room in the centre for an infill core. Cores can be used for different purposes – insulation for heat/acoustic performance, security, fire resistance etc. We offer a range of core infills for our doors that will improve their Thermal U-Value. The Thermal U-Value measures the amount of heat lost through the thickness of a certain material, so the lower the number, the better.

We can offer Honeycomb, Solid Timber, Mineral wool and Polyurethane. Due to its high density, Polyurethane is our most efficient infill, posting a U value of 1.6 wm²k. This is available on OUTA-DOR’s and will help to prevent heat escaping through the door.

Making server rooms more efficient

Server rooms are the backbone of most businesses nowadays, storing essential company data and processing all digital actions within the business. All that data processing causes them to generate a large amount of heat. Higher temperatures seriously affect the performance of data equipment, so it’s important to keep servers cool, so they operate efficiently. Modern equipment will cope well with higher heat levels and have energy efficient options to reduce energy usage. So, upgrading your servers will ensure they function better and use less energy. You can also use Louvred doors to help regulate temperatures by maintaining constant ventilation to the server room while securing the room. Check out our blog: 3 tips for protecting your server room for how to properly ventilate.

Energy efficient lighting

Often remaining switched on during business hours, lights use lots of energy. Employees left to lock up may forget to switch the lights off when they leave, meaning they could also remain on at all hours. To prevent this happening, install motion sensors with timers inside your property. That way, the lights will turn off by themselves when there is no movement sensed in the building – saving energy and money.

A lot of businesses still use older style incandescent light bulbs that require lots of power to run and needed replacing regularly. So these should be considered replacing for LED style light bulbs. These use up to 80% less energy and have a much longer lifespan. Also, fire exit lights remain switched almost all the time as they run on a backup power supply. So, replacing these bulbs for LED will save even more energy and money!

Turn the heating down

Throughout the cold Winter months, the heating is often switched on during the whole working day, using massive amounts of energy. Turning the temperature down slightly or restricting its use can drastically reduce the heating bill and energy usage. Of course, you don’t want to make staff and visitors feel cold and uncomfortable. However, turning the temperature down by just 1 degree can reduce your heating bill by up to 10%! Also, consider turning off radiators in unoccupied rooms or turn off the whole heating system when there is no one in the building. Heating unoccupied rooms and buildings is just throwing money away.