Hi There! We are an aspiring B Corp, and currently working through our environmental practices and policies. Our company works in a 100% remote model, and we are having some difficulty in working out how to measure electricity/water usage for our home offices. Does anyone have any good benchmarks for electricity/water use in home offices in Aus?
Thanks, Alana
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Hey Alana,
There are a couple of ways you can look at this as far as I am aware.
Water - Get everyone to count how many cups of coffee/glasses of water/visits to the bathroom over a week and then average that over a year.
Power - In NZ I work in a home office and so I can apportion a % of my power usage to the business for tax purposes. Taking the % of your house that the office makes up and using that as a % of the power used is one way. Alternatively, you can get an estimate of power used by looking at what devices you are using on a typical day and finding out their average power use and then again extrapolating to a year.
Unless you have smart meters this will be the best you can do!
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Kia ora Alana - we did power all kinds for our team’s home offices by using bills and proportioning them as @TheGrowGoodGuy suggests (we did gas as well as eletricity). We also used Ekos calculator to translate those into C02e. I’d start by doing what you CAN do - you can always work to improve your reporting in future years. It’s a journey Hope that helps - and good luck! Kath
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Hi @Aowen I run an entirely remote company. We use a calculator to measure home energy use. We were with Pathzero but have recently switched to Trace. These are both paid platforms. They use an average calculation for home energy use, but do not capture water.
Prior to using a platform I was trying to get everyone to input their electricity & water into a spreadsheet. Although this is painful, it is a more accurate reading. If you’re wanting to reduce actual use – you need actual measurements. You then need staff to make a guess at what water/energy % of use is attributable to them… or their work-related use. For ease I just said their use total… as I’d rather over-offset and/or reduce their total use… not just work-related. If you’re still following me!
We are now undertaking a pilot where we provide home energy assessments (~$350) to all staff. There is literally an assessor about to start a road-trip from Melbourne stopping in at all our employees homes up the East Coast! And then we’ll tackle SA & WA later. This is to address how we can reduce home emissions – as the vast majority of our footprint is home-based emissions.
There are many other platforms and calculators you can use for electricity – but again they’ll use an average which is probably a “good enough” guess but it won’t track any reduction.
I hope this helps! Good luck!
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thanks everyone, this is really helpful information.
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Agreed @Aowen Great qu and replies. This may help us when we speak with our office landlord about tracking our emissions. Better to have solutions than go in wide eyed! 