AU · 2026 edition
Office Energy Saving Guide — Australia
Roughly half a building's energy sits inside your tenancy. This prices every bit of it — what you'd save, what it costs, how fast it pays back, and who controls it.
What’s inside
A plain-English walk through every part of a small office’s power bill — written by an energy manager who has spent 15 years cutting energy costs for commercial and industrial sites.
Each section covers one energy use and gives you the three numbers that matter: what you’d save a year, what the fix costs up front, and how long it takes to pay back. Colour-coded, so the quick wins jump out and the long shots are honest about it.
- Savings at a Glance — one page, ranked by saving and payback. Start here.
- Your Bill, Tariff & Rebates — what you’re actually paying for, and what you can change.
- Lighting — usually the fastest money in an office.
- Computers & Equipment — including the fleet-wide sleep settings worth about $1,500 a year across 25 desks, for nothing.
- Heating & Cooling — setpoints, schedules and after-hours running.
- Kitchen & Hot Water · Solar & Batteries — including when they don’t stack up for a tenancy.
- Quick Wins to do this week — free or near-free.
- Appendix: Behind the Numbers — the assumptions, so you can check our working.
Tenant or landlord?
Most offices rent, and there’s nothing more useless than advice about a chiller you don’t own. Every opportunity is tagged with who controls it, so you can separate what you fix this week from what goes in an email to the building manager — and know which ones are worth sending.
Who it’s for
Owners, office managers and practice managers of small Australian offices and professional services businesses — anyone who sees the power bill and wonders which line of it they can actually do something about.
The honest bit
Figures are sized for a typical small office tenancy — around 200 m² with about 25 staff. Scale up or down for yours.
Some upgrades don’t pay back in a leased office. Those are marked as such, with the working shown, rather than quietly omitted.
17-page PDF · 2026 edition · Australian rates, rebates and standards · every figure traces to a documented source or a calculation we show our working for · free corrections to the 2026 edition.
See inside
Real pages from the guide — a preview of the at-a-glance savings summary (every row unlocked in the full guide) and a complete category page, exactly as you'll get it.
