If you have a small business with any kind of brick and mortar presence, with anything from a big monster warehouse clear down to a tiny home office, you have utility costs. Heating, cooling, power, water–all of these things play a vital role in your small business’ operations. And Retroficiency wants to help you get a handle on those costs with their Virtual Energy Assessment online tool.
The Virtual Energy Assessment sets out to replace the standard, traditional methods of energe usage analysis with a whole new set of methods. While previously, you generally needed to take a walk through the building in question to analyze the building’s energy usage and the like, the Virtual Energy Assessment makes things a lot simpler. You’ll need two things: one, the building’s address, and two, a year’s worth of what’s called energy use interval data. With these two points in hand, the Virtual Energy Assessment can then start making observations about the business’ energy use patterns.
You might think that such a thing wouldn’t be near as useful as, say, going out and looking at things, or taking a walk around a building with an infrared camera looking for heat loss. But as it turns out, the tool can spot some really unexpected things, like lighting activating much earlier than necessary, or in one particularly unusual instance, heating and cooling systems that were operating at the same time, thus burning energy in both directions and wasting a lot of energy, and in turn, jacking the company in question’s power bills through the roof.
They’re still working on getting this one into wider release, but once it does, you’ll have a lot of opportunity to drop your utility bills, which in turn gives you more money to reinvest in other ventures that can make your business better. Plus, of course, you’ll have the critical advantage of using less power, being greener, and giving yourself a PR advantage to exploit when you need it, because for some customers, nothing draws them in like green.
And to handle all those extra customers, you’ll want to be ready with things like a hunt group, digital fax receiving services, and similar cloud-based telephony system services. But these things take power too, and reducing your power consumption frees up more of that oh so necessary juice to keep your systems running.
Related keywords: Green technology, utilities, cloud based telephony, public relations