Hendrik Ceh
End of September ’22, we started our (non-)heating experiment.
Due to the energy crisis in Europe last year, we had decided to leave the radiators in our office turned off for as long as possible – with the help of heated vests that can be charged via USB powerbanks. And here is how the experiment turned out:
Let’s first look at the plain numbers. Standard gas consumption per year is about 140 kWh/m2 in a normal building. In our office, this would correspond to an energy consumption of approximately 9380 kWh. We have consumed 2490 kWh in 5 months, which would correspond to 5976 kWh extrapolated to the year. The comparison is not quite correct, because we simply extrapolated the heating period, but the heating is off in summer. So, a pretty amazing result.
How did we do this?
We bought six vests in different sizes for our staff plus four additional power banks. Although we are a team of eleven people in total, six vests were sufficient because many of us are frequently working from home.
So, this was our investment: 6* 60 € for the vests + 120 € for powerbanks = 480 € in total.
Thus, we kept the office at 18 degrees Celsius from October until March.
Our colleagues used the vests at different power levels based on their own comfort levels (some like it cooler than others ;-)).
All in all, we were able to reduce our consumption of energy to 40 % compared to the previous year, which resulted in 700 kilograms less CO2 emissions (as we use fully green electricity) and savings of 100€ per month.
-> return on invest in less than 5 months and nobody was freezing!
And trust us when we say, we will definitely continue with this experiment, which turned out to be 100 % worth it – not only for our bank account, but for the environment as well.
