What Hotels of Any Size Can Do to Become More Energy Efficient

9 ‘Small Step, Big Impact’ Energy Efficiency Tips Hotels Can Use to Slash Expenses, Help the Environment, and Please Customers

There’s a lot of information on how much power a house uses, but hotel usage can be trickier to find.

According to Energy Star, the average hotel in America spends $2196 per room every year on energy. 

If you could reduce that by just 20% using fairly simple and low-cost energy efficiency and energy-saving strategies, lowering that cost to $1750 per room, what would that do for your net profits and your hotel’s long term growth?

Yes, some energy efficiency improvements that make the biggest impacts can also be very complicated and costly to implement. The list you’re about to see has none of those. All of these energy saving tips can be implemented by hotels of almost any size, with reasonable cost.

1. Automatic Shutdown Sockets

These allow you to turn off power to specific devices while rooms are unoccupied. Unoccupied rooms actually represent many of your greatest opportunities for energy savings, as you will see as you keep scanning this list.

2. Be Smart about Lighting

By now you probably know about LED lighting. But that’s only one way to save energy (and costs) on your lights.

But first – if you haven’t made the switch to LED lighting in as many places as possible in your hotel – now is the time. LED bulbs last far longer than traditional bulbs. Most studies have found that you recover your investment within just a couple years. And since the bulbs tend to last as long as ten years, you stand to save a lot of money.

If your fixtures use a different type of bulb, consider replacing GLS lamps and T12 fluorescents with T5 tubes. Another option may include compact fluorescent bulbs (CFLs). All of these last far longer than traditional bulbs, and you can save up to 80% on your lighting costs.

And, don’t forget about bulbs in common areas. These lights are probably turned on the most. So any energy savings you can reap in those areas, including exit and other emergency signs, represent your greatest potential for saving money.

But other lighting changes allow you to save even more.

The key is simply to keep lights on less often.

In the guest rooms, you can install sensors in places like closets, bathrooms, and entry ways that will turn off lights when those areas are not in use. Sometimes guests forget to turn off lights and then leave the room for the whole day.

Also, in your common areas, conduct an inventory of which lights are on, at which times of day. Do you need all your common area lights on during the day? Turn them off when natural light does the job. And with dimmer switches, perhaps you can lower the brightness of lights in areas seldom used during the middle of the night.

3. Optimize All Temperatures

In summer, bedrooms don’t need to feel like refrigerators. In winter, guests don’t need to feel like they’re in the tropics. If you have more advanced thermostats that can also be controlled by the front desk, you can set your system to not heat rooms until the temperature falls below a certain level, and to not cool them until it rises above one. There is a range of temperature when neither heating nor cooling are really necessary.

Also, you can set fixed limits on the range of your thermostats so the temperature cannot be set above 80 or below 60, for example.

Those few guests who feel they need the more extreme temperatures can get them. But the majority of your guests won’t mind, or probably even notice.

Also, in your backrooms, you don’t need the temperature to be quite as optimized as in guest rooms. And in the common areas, especially during low-traffic times like the middle of the night, consider reducing the strain you put on the system.

Every 1 degree difference saves you 2-3% on energy costs. 

With regard to water, some hotels have their water heaters set far higher than is necessary. For hot water used by guest rooms, temperatures between 110 and 120 will serve guests fine. These are considered standard temperatures, even in home water heaters.

For water you use for cleaning dishes and other sanitation procedures, you might keep that water heater set at a higher temperature.

In hot climates, tinting your sunny windows can reduce cooling costs substantially. Here’s a hotel in Dallas that saved $50k per year by combining tinted windows with programmable thermostats.

And one note about programmable thermostats: Don’t install them right over the heater or in a place where they will be hit with direct sun, as this tricks the sensor into thinking the room is hotter than it really is.

4. Book Rooms in Clusters

Heat emanates between walls. In winter especially, during parts of the week when your hotel is not typically filled to capacity, try to book guests into rooms that border each other. And think three dimensionally. Eight rooms, four on each floor on top of each other, is a nice cubic cluster that will retain more heat between rooms.

And reserve the extremities of your hotel for last when booking in winter. This includes your entire top floor as well as the corners. And in the summer in warm climates, this includes your west-facing rooms.

If you know that during certain times of the year, your hotel never reaches capacity for several weeks or months, consider completely powering down some of these rooms. Just don’t forget to power them back up before your reservations start to increase again!

5. Reduce Unnecessary Laundry Costs

Most people don’t wash their sheets every single day. There’s little reason to do it in your hotel rooms either.

An effective way to empower your guests to reduce laundry is to put a laminated note on the bed that tells them if the note is not on the bed when housekeeping comes in, their sheets will not be washed. This method works well because even people who don’t read the note will still move it, meaning the sheets won’t get washed.

Likewise, when you provide guests with more places to hang wet towels, they will be more likely to reuse them for multiple days.

These simple changes will drastically reduce your laundry volume, saving both water and energy costs, as well as staff labor.

6. Install an HVAC System that Allows Central Control

Depending on your current system, this may or may not be an easy or low-cost option. However, giving your staff the ability to control the t