Converting commercial buildings to more energy-efficient cool air systems can make huge environmental and economic improvements – but often costs are not worth the cost. For example, installing a cool roof increases efficiency from 20% to 50% – but has a cost of about $300,000 to install the appropriate shading structure, and a cooling price of about $500,000. You can save over 50% – or more – by choosing lower-cost air conditioning options or cooling solutions, but either will leave you with a short-term cooling solution that will only serve you for a few years at most, after which you may need frequent maintenance or repairs from a professional air conditioning company to keep it running.
Lowering the costs of cooling your building is easy and often involves taking a new look at the systems you already have. New buildings often carry commercial cooling equipment designed to do only that, but older buildings often have a large amount of room air-conditioning, which is not designed for efficient cooling. Older ones may have to check and fix leaks and punctures that can be carried out by a commercial roofing company. The old systems are cooled by the air, which is not very efficient – but cooling your old building this way is not economically practical unless you go with air-cooling and replacement cooling systems that are already quite efficient, like cooling towers. But the biggest problem is that these newer systems are very expensive, and the commercial market is dominated by large-scale systems that consume large amounts of electricity.
Many building owners have so little flexibility in their budgets that they must rely on large-scale cooling systems. But if you do so, you will find that, with some creative budgeting, you can take some very aggressive steps to improve the energy efficiency of your cooling and save some serious money. For example, if you want to cool 100,000 square feet of commercial space, you can expect to pay about $60 per square foot for air conditioning – and that can amount to several million dollars over the years. So you can save tens of thousands of dollars by bringing down the average cost of cooling a single building by 50% to 65% – or more. And once you start converting older cooling systems to lower-cost, efficient cooling solutions, you may be able to save more over time – but the approach will be an ongoing process as you upgrade your cooling system to meet the changing needs of your building and the demands of the local marketplace.
But perhaps the most important thing to remember is that saving money for your business is not always an all-or-nothing proposition. By finding ways to reduce costs and meet the changing needs of your facility, you can save money while still enjoying the comfort of cool air throughout your facility. This article provides some examples of cooling solutions – low-cost solutions – that can help you bring down the cost of your existing buildings, even if the cost savings come only in the short term. There are lots of opportunities to improve the air conditioning efficiency of your commercial buildings – whether that’s using a service like Albert Culver or finding another solution to cool down your building. There are also a large variety of ways to save money on cooling your commercial buildings, with cooling towers making for the ultimate solution to demonstrate your commitment to sorting the issue out on a more permanent basis.
