This may seem nearly frivolous, but think about how many times your employees venture outdoors to throw away garbage, get rid of boxes, or dispose of materials. Even if the doors are only open for a few seconds every time, if the weather outside is humid or hot, that air is getting sucked into your building, causing the cooling systems to work overtime to bring the temperature back to normal. The same can be said for opening the space up during the winter. If you’re paying to heat the inside, introducing much colder air will only cause the heater to work harder to keep up. Instead of putting your building at the mercy of your employees’ swift exit and reentry, consider enclosing the area surrounding the platform of the compactor or dumpsters – not enclosing the trash compactors or dumpsters within the building, just installing curtain walls outside the exterior doors to limit the amount of temperature change that happens when employees take out trash. This is an effective method for saving on energy costs.
If you’re adjusting your entire building’s temperatures to keep up with the needs of one specific project, you could be wasting a lot of money on heating or cooling the building when an industrial curtain wall could contain the area that needs to be a different temperature. The same can be said for areas that need higher or lower humidity. Enclosing these project spaces with retractable curtains allows you to have greater control over your heating and cooling costs, while simultaneously giving the employees who are working on these types of projects a designated area to work and contain their progress.
A similar situation to the trash compactor and dumpster issue, delivery and loading docks can be spaces that let a lot of heat and cold into the building in just a short amount of time. Even if a delivery or loading job only takes five minutes, and the trucks are backed up to the dock, there is still a good amount of external air that can seep into the building and cause your systems to work hard to get the temperature back to what it needs to be. Installing curtain walls outside your building’s loading and delivery docks can give your trucks’ beds a secure, weather-guarded solution for loading and unloading, which is not only energy efficient but ideal for employees as well, if it is storming outside—this way, they can stay under the enclosure to help load and unload shipments.
If you’ve been trying to think of ways to lower your energy costs, look around your workspace and consider whether there might be areas that could benefit from using industrial curtain walls. For more information about them, contact AmCraft today.
