LabRATS Best Practices
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Energy
Learn more about energy efficiency below!
Close fume hood sashes ALWAYS: Fume hoods draw out warmed or cooled air from your lab 24/7. Closing them when not in use or lowering them to their lowest positions slows down air intake by 60-80%, saving anywhere from hundreds to thousands of dollars per year and making it the easiest and biggest payback item in any lab! If a fume hood in your lab is rarely used or non-operational, you may request maintenance staff to turn off its circuit breaker.
Ask for Energy Star appliance and instrumentation: Most laboratory equipment is not supplied with energy efficient features because scientists rarely ask for them. When purchasing equipment, ask for efficient features, such as installed times on autoclave heaters or ovens. As a bonus, it is very likely that your campus energy manager or Southern California Edison may give you a rebate!
Choose the right size appliance: Right-sized autoclaves, incubators, and ovens can save 50-80% energy, around 10-80 kWh per day. This can add up to $300-2,000 in energy costs for that one appliance (250 days per year, $0.12/kWh)! An example of using a right-sized appliance would be if you only had a small amount to autoclave and you chose to either combine this load with another labs's in order to do a full load, or to autoclave the small load using a countertop version of the typically large autoclave.
Choose the right size appliance: Right-sized autoclaves, incubators, and ovens can save 50-80% energy, around 10-80 kWh per day. This can add up to $300-2,000 in energy costs for that one appliance (250 days per year, $0.12/kWh)! An example of using a right-sized appliance would be if you only had a small amount to autoclave and you chose to either combine this load with another labs's in order to do a full load, or to autoclave the small load using a countertop version of the typically large autoclave.
Turn off chilled centrifuges, ovens, and gas chromatographs when not in use: Many scientists consider their equipment too unstable or slow to warm/cool to turn off, thus wasting a lot of electricity. However, most ovens, GCs, and centrifuges reach their temperature in 30-45 minutes, so planning ahead and turning them on a few minutes before use would make no inconvenience to your work! You can save 5-10 kWh per day per oven or centrifuge that you leave off.
Defrost and clean refrigerator/freezer coils: Establishing a preventative maintenance schedule can extend the lives of your ULTs as well as increase their efficiency! Investigations at the National Institutes of Health have indicated that for every year of a ULT freezer's life, its energy consumption increases by 3%. The study was conducted on well-maintained freezers; therefore, 3% is a likely conservative estimate. Maintained freezers are defined as those operated at ambient temperature (25°C to 27°C); are operating at a set point higher than -80°C; are properly spaced; have little or no frost on the outer door gaskets; and have no dust on the filter and condenser fins.
Turn off overhead lights if daylight is adequate, or use a task light if alone in the lab: Lighting energy uses about 10-20% of laboratory energy. With 20 overhead lamps per lab at 50 W each, adding up to 1 kW per hour -- with 700 labs on campus, this number starts to add up. During the day, utilize natural lighting wherever possible! Also, consider using a task lamp over your work area at night if alone.
When in doubt, measure the power consumption yourself: Think some appliances in your lab might be inefficient, but do not know for certain? Borrow a Watt meter from LabRATS to find out! You may find out your machine really isn't as bad as you though, or you may find out it's not working correctly and needs repair. Your data may become part of our growing data file on instruments and power efficiency.