Friday switch-off of non-essential equipment (Friday, 22 – Sunday, 24 November)

14 Nov 2024

In an effort to become zero carbon by 2038, the University is inviting colleagues to take part in our first “Switch-off for the weekend” campaign, a campus-wide initiative to demonstrate how much energy we can save by shutting down non-essential items for a single weekend.

Our University is committed to becoming zero carbon by 2038 with key intermediary targets for the next 5 years set in our Sustainable Future Strategy (p31), such as reducing by August 2025 our energy consumption by 10% against a 2018 baseline.

A first step consists of switching off non-essential equipment when we are not on campus: at night, when working from home, over the weekend and during holidays.  Whilst some buildings benefit from automatic features to save energy, some do not have these systems in place yet (part of our master plan for zero carbon), so we rely for now on human actions to make a difference.

Previous analysis has shown that over the winter festive period, the University saw a reduction of 25% in energy usage (equating to a cost saving of £150,000). These savings could be greater if we embed these ‘switch-off’ habits of non-essential items throughout the year.

That’s why, on Friday 22 November, we’re inviting colleagues to take part in our first “Switch-off for the weekend” campaign - a campus-wide initiative to demonstrate how much energy we can save by shutting down non-essential items for a single weekend. All staff can take part, but for this pilot campaign, in Humanities we are specifically focusing on Samuel Alexander Building and Humanities Bridgeford Street Building. We will track the data on these two buildings to see the impact of the campaign.

The intention is to encourage everyone to identify the non-essential items in their environment, where relevant label them with stickers (switch me off, but also keep me on for essential equipment), and to maintain the habit of switching off before leaving for the weekend.

Office and study workspace

Whether you’re leaving work on Friday or earlier in the week and know your equipment won’t be used by anybody else, please consider switching off, for example, the following:

• Lights
• Phone chargers
• Desktop PCs and monitors (unless you require remote access from elsewhere)
• Localised (not managed by Estates) heating (e.g. electric heaters)
• Personal kitchen appliances (e.g. coffee machines, microwaves)

For Centrally Timetabled Spaces (CTS) and student computer clusters please leave equipment as you find it (cluster PCs’ power status is managed centrally and programmatically).

Next steps

Following our first “Switch-off for the weekend” campaign, members of the central and Faculty ES teams will be crunching the numbers and reporting back how much energy was saved across the weekend, both as an institution and on a building-by-building basis.

In the meantime, if you have any questions around this campaign, please contact:

Building managers: Osen Kilic-Yildirim (Sam Alex) / Jonny Brewster (HBS)

Faculty of Humanities Environmental Sustainability leads: Anke Bernau and Roz Webster