Wednesday, December 10, 2008

Kudos to Channel 2 Houston

Anyone that knows me, can tell you I'm a big Channel 2 fan. I especially like Owen Conflenti and Stephen Dean for all their help to us during Hurricane Ike.

Last night the station reported on one of our pet peeves. They did a story on the government (our taxpayer dollars) leaving the lights on all night. The Harris County Law Center has a light bill of $17,000 a month. The City of Houston has a building at 611 Walker St. Their light bill is an astonishing $133,000 a month. Both buildings would leave their lights on 24/7. Channel 2 talked to all the facilities managers of the buildings and immediately noticed a difference in most cases.

This is our money paying these bills. Just doing simple tasks of turning off the lights in the room when you leave makes a difference.

At HP we had instructions to turn the lights off in a room when you left. The security guards making their rounds would turn out any lights in rooms if they found them on. I got put in the dark many times when they didn't see me.

At BMC the lights automatically went off at a certain time. You could turn them back on if you were still working. They also powered down the A/C or Heat for the hours people were not there.

If every business would take simple measures of turning off lights, informing employees of the options to saving electricity and having the guards turn off lights, everyone would save money and the resources would not be used as fast.

Lights Out Houston is a great website. It gives lots of information on what a company can do to save.

Shout out to Channel 2 for their Green solutions!

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