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Posted: Sun 12th Jan 2025
A £60 smart plug could save Wrexham County Borough Council thousands on its electrical bills if a new pilot scheme proves successful.
The pilot – which estimates suggest could save the council 30% on energy bills – will run at the authority’s Ruthin Road site and will see devices simply plugged into the smart plug, which will then plug into the power as usual.
The device will show how much energy each device uses while on standby and while in use. It will also show how often devices are used and when.
Once the data has been gathered, officers can then consider strategies to power down devices completely at times of low or no usage to save additional money across the borough.
The pilot is an extension of a trial run by Dave Evans, Wrexham’s Smart City Development Officer, at Ruthin Road.
“We’re hoping to see maybe a 30% reduction on costs,” he told Wrexham Council’s Employment, Business and Investment Scrutiny Committee. “We don’t know which is why we are running a pilot. If it’s successful we can roll it out to all council buildings.”
The idea for the pilot came as Mr Evans used the smart plug to monitor a number of devices at Ruthin Road, starting with a photocopier.
“I just wanted to understand the photocopier’s usage,” he said. “The data showed that when the site closed on Friday the power usage was 4.75 kilowatt hours (kWh) of electricity, when we opened up on Monday it had used 9.79kWh.
“That told us it drew down 5kWh when the building was shut.”
The findings sparked an idea to use the tech to explore what savings could be made simply by switching off power to devices when not in use.
“This smart plug does not save us considerable amounts of money,” he told councillors. “It gives us information and provokes thought and ideas. From that data, if you chase the money you go: ‘how many photocopiers have we got?’”
“If all the photocopiers were the same model and were all left on it would be a considerable amount of money for the local authority. But then you have to ask why does it cost that much, how many do we have, why do we need that many, how are they used?
“We could plug smart plugs into all photocopiers in the building and see how and when it was used, so for example one may be used 20 times a day, the other one gets used twice a day. The question is then whether we save ourselves some money on procurement and do away with the second photocopier?
“It’s endless the savings that we could make.”
Mr Evans also trialled the plug on the large TV screens at Ruthin Road.
“I plugged it into a meeting room screen,” he said. “One of those screens will cost us £70 a year on standby outside of office hours.
“Not a lot, but when you think of the volume of those screens in council offices, it’s a considerable amount.”
He revealed that the trial would this week become a full pilot, reviewing energy use throughout the Ruthin Road site to determine what savings the council could make.
“I’ve put an idea through to the change programme,” he said. “Someone suggested that we just buy a load of smart plugs but that’s not cost effective.
“The idea I’ve had is like a trip switch – like you have at home to turn off your downstairs sockets or upstairs sockets – using programmable switches.
“We are doing a scoping exercise at Ruthin Road to see what we can turn off, obviously we need to keep fire alarms, security alarms, CCTV, fridges and comms cabinets on.
“But why is everything else powered up? Let’s just turn it off.”
Concerns were raised by Bangor-Is-Y-Coed Cllr Robert Ian Williams over security at council sites.
“Sometimes you like to keep the lights on in buildings for security,” he said. “To leave buildings shrouded in darkness I think wouldn’t be good.”
But Andrew Harradine, Wrexham’s Regeneration and Business Investment lead, said the data would only equip departments with the information to make their own decisions.
The cost of keeping lights on for security, as long as someone has thought about that and it’s an informed choice to do that then that’s absolutely the right decision,” he said. “It’s not for us to say how every team should operate, but rather helping them understand what that cost is.”
By Alec Doyle – BBC Local Democracy Reporter
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