Sky Garden’s Guide to Thriving Winter Houseplants
At idverde, we absolutely adore indoor plants and truly believe they elevate indoor spaces. Not only do they add beauty, but they also have a positive impact on our health and well-being.
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Grounds Maintenance, Landscape Creation, Arboriculture, Sports Surfacing, Parks management, IOS Managing Safely Training, Ecology & Biodiversity, Grass cutting, Horticulture, Street Cleaning, Soft Landscaping, Hard Landscaping
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idverde provides a wide range of green services, including grounds maintenance, landscape creation, and advice services, to both private and public sectors across the UK.
30 January 2023
The idverde guide to commercial energy saving
It’s increasingly important for us all to think about how much energy we use and where we could make savings. The less energy we use, the more money we save, and we’re also making a positive contribution towards a healthier environment.
There are lots of tips and advice about how we can save energy individually, but it’s just as important that organisations look at their energy use. There are huge benefits to be had here, just by thinking a bit differently about how we do things. And those changes could have significant commercial impacts too.
In this quick guide, we’ve listed some of the general ways that businesses can become more energy efficient. And we’ve also set out the things we’re doing at idverde to make a difference right now.
General quick wins
Lighting – replacing traditional bulbs with LED bulbs is a win-win in your home and in your office. They use significantly less energy and it’s an easy change to make.
Kitchens – simple things like only filling the kettle with the amount of water you really need can help to keep energy costs down. Don’t run the dishwasher unless it’s full, and switch all appliances off at the wall outside working hours.
Heating – if you have control over your heating, make sure it’s only on when there are people in the office. This is particularly important if your team is working remotely and there are days when no one is in the office. And when the office is occupied, try turning the thermostat down by half a degree or a degree. It makes a lot of energy sense to optimise the energy required to provide your office with adequate heating and hot water.
Meetings – can you run your meetings online? Meeting virtually saves on travel costs and on the fuel used by your car or public transport. Save face-to-face meetings for when they are really needed.
Specific savings – the above tips are all pretty general advice. Every business is different, so look at the type of work you do and where energy savings could be made. We tend to get into the habit of doing something the same way every time. But small changes can make a big difference.
What are we doing at idverde?
As a landscape and green spaces maintenance and creation company, idverde has some challenges to overcome in terms of saving energy. For example, most of the energy used through our business activities is in the form of liquid fuels such as diesel and petrol. We use these in our vans and machinery, and some of our equipment too.
We’re doing the following things to help reduce this energy consumption:
- Optimising our routes to keep vehicle mileage as low as possible.
- Monitoring engine idling across the fleet. We also monitor driver behaviour, such as harsh breaking or fast acceleration – these all use more fuel, so improving our driver approach will help to save energy.
- We train our drivers and have a dedicated handbook, encouraging safe and economical use of our vehicles and driven machinery.
- We plan work to avoid unnecessary journeys – such as additional trips to a depot or a supplier
- In some cases, drivers take our vehicles home at night, giving lifts to other colleagues. This reduces the amount of transport into our depots and encourages vehicle sharing.
We work closely with our clients to make sure we’re focused on reducing our energy use and choosing cleaner, more cost-effective ways of doing things. This might including integrating new technology into the business, such as robotic mowers, which use substantially less energy than traditional machines.
Where we can use rechargeable electric power, we do. On many of our contracts, we have agreed energy-saving and green targets, and we are always looking for ways to deliver the results our client wants in the most efficient way.
For example, we encourage our clients to look at managing their parks, verges and open spaces as sustainably as possible. In many cases, this means reducing mowing. So rather than a regime of frequent mowing, which uses a lot of energy, there may be times where we don’t mow at all. And of course, as well as the energy savings, this has a positive impact on local biodiversity and healthier natural surroundings.
At idverde, we’ll continue to look for ways to manage our energy use more efficiently, work with our partners to improve energy practices and share our thoughts and ideas to see where else we can improve.
