Restaurant Electric Heater

Thought Leadership

Restaurants: Check Your Electric Heaters!

When the HVAC system just isn’t cutting it during the winter, many restaurant operators turn to supplemental electric heating options to pick up the slack along drafty windows, inside vestibules, or along covered/enclosed patios. While such options can be cheaper up front than installing new HVAC, they come with higher energy bills. These higher energy […]

When the HVAC system just isn’t cutting it during the winter, many restaurant operators turn to supplemental electric heating options to pick up the slack along drafty windows, inside vestibules, or along covered/enclosed patios. While such options can be cheaper up front than installing new HVAC, they come with higher energy bills.

These higher energy bills for electric heating are primarily the result of two things:

  1. Electricity costs are higher than natural gas
  2. Supplemental electric heating typically lacks the same level of control as an HVAC system 

As a result, this high cost source of heat can be left to run beyond operating hours and well into the cooling season (which adds additional load and cost to the HVAC system).

Restaurant Electric HeaterThe chart here illustrates how a customer’s electric heaters were left to run 24/7 at a restaurant that is closed from 10PM until 11:30AM. That is over 13 hours of wasteful heating every day. By subscribing to SiteSage Managed Services, this customer enabled our Tech Support team to proactively reach out to the restaurant GM to remediate. By exposing real-time usage, SiteSage made it possible to ensure adherence to on/off schedules. The result is about $200 per month in energy savings from this one small change.

SiteSage users understand the costs of an unmanaged electric heater. As cooling season approaches, these customers use SiteSage reports and alerts to set and enforce best practices for electric heating. A couple of minutes every month with SiteSage reports (or a one-time setting of SiteSage controls) can net significant savings.

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