If you've ever owned or managed a public-use building, which of these two following resources is easier to control;

You can certainly reduce water usage by flow/volume control valves and efficient toilets.  Electricity...can't offer any ideas without knowing the utility of the building:  offices, manufacturing, restaurant, church, etc.   In any case, not giving or limiting access to thermostats and lighting controls is step one.  Insulation and doors/windows are also big factors.   This post was edited by Thriftymaid at February 9, 2018 6:53 PM MST

TYPO

Ok.  Back to that insipid, I mean inspirational quesiton....


MOOT.  Never have.  Were you looking for answers to this?  Because you have to maybe find 3 people that ever have on here.

How many members do we have?  Six, then maybe one people knows this answer from personal experience.

Someone like a guy who lives in the woods.   Some fellow who did this in his youth.  Some old guy who did this while a retiree'.

Some homeless man.  Well, maybe you will get more answers, come to think of it.


This post was edited by WM BARR . =ABSOLUTE TRASH at February 9, 2018 8:10 PM MST

ive never owned or managed a building

Water, usually. People will turn off taps but tend to leave lights, chargers etc on longer than necessary.

This question has a personal connection. In my last year at work, before retiring, I was given the task of reading each week about a dozen electricity-meter readings around the building. The premises has a mixture of offices, laboratories, workshops, utility-rooms of various types, and a complex, high-power Intranet connecting probably well over 200 PCs and a some tens of printers etc.

I had to present the data to the building-services management, and did so as a spreadsheet I created in 'Excel', of both numbers and "live" graphs that stepped forwards one dot per week. Though I hope Bill Gates' ears were smouldering at my comments at how his bunch had removed a basic but valuable feature, forcing me to edit the individual equation for each trace, for each new entry! 

There was a point to this.

Due to its size, the company participates in something called the Energy Savings Opportunities Scheme - a weasel name because it is not an "opportunity" at all but is compulsory, a UK Government legal initiative to force firms over a certain monitor their utilities use, and hopefully identify where savings can be made - and act on them. Commercially valuable, but not just in the obvious reduction of overheads. It is often also part of working to gaining ISO14000 - an internationally-recognised bullsh+t plan accreditation concerned with environmental protection. (Anything with EU or ISO in its name is manna from Heaven for jobsworths!) 

In our case this included wholesale replacement of the fluorescent ceiling lamps with l.e.d. versions, with proximity-detectors in the corridors so their lamps would turn on after you'd passed them.  I had the inglorious task of dismantling the old ones to put different classes of materials in the appropriate scrap bins.

Just before I retired my meter-reading rounds were ended anyway because the meters were replaced with digital versions that could supply their kWh counts directly to management. An internal, small-scale analogue to what the Government intends throughout the UK, that eventually all premises including private homes will have the stupidly-named "smart meters" that both give instant Watts readings to the user and radio-telephone the kWh readings directly to the suppliers' customer-accounts departments.