What’s still using energy in your school on a Sunday in August?!
There aren’t any pupils in the classrooms. Most of the staff are at home or sunning themselves somewhere lovely while they can. The heating’s off, and very little should be running beyond the equipment that genuinely needs to stay on.
So, what’s your school still consuming?
That quiet-period energy and water meter reading is what I like to think of as your estate’s ‘resting heart rate’. Before you start looking for ways to reduce energy use, you need to understand what that baseline looks like.
Your energy bill shouldn’t be thought of as just another cost to approve. It’s also a useful diagnostic check.
If I were taking over the management of a commercial building, one of the first things I’d want to understand is its energy use. I’d look at what the building consumes when it’s quiet, then compare that with what happens when it’s operating at full capacity.
Schools can do exactly that, too.
Start with a period where your school is almost completely inactive. A Sunday during the summer holidays is perfect. Record your gas and electric usage, then compare it with a period of high demand, such as the first few days after Christmas holidays when the heating is working overtime.
Those readings should be very different. If they aren’t, then you need to ask why.
The Department for Education’s energy-efficiency guidance recommends using meters to understand consumption over time. Half-hourly smart-meter data can be particularly useful, because it clearly reveals how much energy a building uses while unoccupied.
You don’t need to become an energy expert to understand these things. You just need enough information to recognise when something doesn’t look right.
I recently visited a school where the heating system had been left on manual override. Not for a few days. Not for a particularly cold month. For two years.
Nobody had intentionally decided to heat the school unnecessarily. The setting hsd simply been changed, likely for a legitimate reason, and then never reviewed, so didn’t get changed back. A basic comparison across different times and seasons would have raised questions much sooner.
What a waste. The money that would have cost the school boggles the mind. Not to mention the environmental impact. Their sustainability lead would have been furious.
My colleague, Andy, has seen the same sort of thing. At one school, a swimming pool pump continued running throughout the summer holidays. At another, a contractor serviced the boiler, switched it on, and left it running when the work was finished. These aren’t complicated engineering failures. They’re everyday oversights that became expensive because nobody is looking at the pattern.
Unnecessary operations like this have hidden costs, too. It adds wear to pumps, boilers, and other equipment. You’re not only paying for the energy they consume (at a time when energy is at a record high, I might add), but you’re also bringing forward the date they need repairing or replacing.
Schools, in general, complete plenty of checks, as you know. But you also know that the value isn't simply the recording of a number for the sake of it. The value comes from understanding what that number is telling you.
Let’s look at a good example: water consumption.
Andy once carried out a simple test. He deliberately set a tap to drip for an hour, measured the water it wasted and used that figure to estimate the impact of a similar leak over a full week. He wasn’t leaving the tap unfixed; he was creating a useful reference point. That ‘number’ without the value attached yet.
The value came once the team understood the school's normal water use. They could see if there was an unexpected increase in water usage, so they had a reason to investigate. It could have meant a dripping tap, a hidden leak, or something else using more water than expected.
That’s a small example, but it demonstrates the right mindset. That reading wasn’t simply a number to record; it was a clue that something needed attention.
Your utility data can help expose:
The bill tells you what you’ve used. But it’s the investigation that tells you why.
It’s tempting to assume that reducing school energy consumption requires a major capital project. You might think ‘oh, to reduce consumption I need a more economic boiler’ or something. And yes, sometimes, investment will be needed. But that shouldn’t be the first assumption.
You can start with what you can change now. Are lights and equipment being switched off in empty rooms? Are doors and windows being left open while the heating is running? Have your controls been adjusted for weekends, holidays and changes in how the building is used?
The DfE recommends understanding your energy use and conducting an audit before deciding where to act. Its guidance also highlights everyday behavioural changes, alongside options such as better heating controls, movement sensors and daylight sensors.
Tech can help with the investigation, too. Thermal-imaging tools that were once highly specialised are now much more accessible. They can help identify gaps around doors and windows, areas of heat loss and potential electrical hotspots.
The point isn’t to buy tech for the sake of it. It’s to use the info you already have, along with sensible checks, to find the right problem before spending money on a solution.
The next time you review your school’s utility consumption, ask:
Finding your baseload won’t answer every energy question, but it gives you somewhere to start.
Once you know what ‘normal’ looks like, waste and unexpected activity become much easier to spot. You can investigate earlier, make better decisions and stop treating each bill as an unavoidable expense. When costs are soaring, this is a no-brainer.
So, what’s your school’s resting heart rate? And when did you last check it?