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Making eco-friendly changes to your warehouse can greatly benefit your business. By retrofitting your warehouse to be more green, you can reduce your facility's carbon footprint, lower its energy costs, and even increase its value. Here are eight changes you can make to help your warehouse become a little more green.
Green Warehousing by Keeping it Cool
One way to help keep an older warehouse cool inside is to revamp the roof. By applying a coating of highly reflective paint to the roof, you can reduce the temperature on the inside. This will allow you to use less air conditioning during the work day.
And, speaking of air conditioning, putting a good layer of paint around your air conditioning units can help them run more efficiently. The reflective paint will help keep the units cooler, increasing their efficiency while lowering energy costs.
All About Insulation
You should always make sure you know what type of insulation your warehouse currently has behind its walls. Loose-fill or spray-foam insulation is much more efficient and effective than the traditional batt insulation. Loose-fill insulation is easier and less expensive to install, but spray-foam is more efficient. In fact, spray-foam is almost twice as efficient as the typical batt insulation.
Light it Up
Lighting is a hot button topic in the green community. With so many different types of lights on the market, it can be confusing to decide which type is best for your warehouse. Consider these lighting upgrades:
- Fluorescent lights - A quick and easy fix to traditional light bulbs are fluorescent lights. Although more expensive, these bulbs use 50% less energy than the old light bulbs and their cost can be recovered in around 2 to 3 years.
- Induction lighting - A slightly more expensive upgrade for your business would be converting to induction lighting. Although they may cost more, the induction lights are 40% more efficient than fluorescent bulbs.
- Lighting sensors - Attaching motion sensors to lights can greatly limit energy usage. By keeping lights shut off in areas that are low traffic or that do not require much lighting, you can save on the energy bill and on buying new lights. Light sensors can limit the amount of light you use by monitoring how much natural light is coming in to the warehouse. Without such sensors, warehouses can be overlit, wasting energy.
Watch the Thermostats
Programmable thermostats are common in commercial settings, but are rarely found in warehouses. By measuring and controlling the temperature in your warehouse, you can shorten heating and cooling cycles which will help save on energy usage and costs.
Turn on the Fan
In climates that are generally cooler, the installation of a destratification fan can reduce the energy needed to heat the warehouse. These fans function by forcing hot air down toward the warehouse floor. The market for these fans has a variety of different sizes depending on the size of the space you need to heat.
Some of these ideas will cost your company money in the short run, but the benefits these strategies will provide in the long run make them crucial changes to any warehouse.
