When most people think about meeting room scheduling software, their next thought is not usually about reducing office utility bills. Efficiently scheduling people in the rooms? Sure. Making sure everyone gets access to the rooms? Definitely. But saving on utility bills? Well it wasn’t my first thought anyway. But it turns out that meeting room scheduling software can do just that!

In many offices, lights for meeting rooms and conference rooms are manually operated.

Typically the office manager or even the custodial staff goes around each day and turns the lights on and off. If done early in the morning and then late at night, the lights are on all day. But what if nobody is in the rooms? Doesn’t matter; the lights are still on. But if your office manager or facilities staff have access to the day’s calendar, they can leave the lights off for rooms that won’t be used.

What’s more, if they know that the room is not scheduled for use after a certain time, they can go in and turn the lights off early. Now, you might wonder why can’t the employees in the office just turn them off? Sure, they absolutely could. But with laptops, coffee cups, pads of paper, and all of the other ephemera they typically have in hand… Who is really going to take the time to put it all down to turn off the lights? OK yes maybe some really diligent and conscious people will do that. But that’s not a really reliable way of cutting your office energy use.

You can also study your meeting room usage data to see which rooms would be the best to put motion sensing light switches into.

Let’s say you have two meeting rooms. In the first meeting room, occupants typically use it for 6 out of 8 hours per day. In another room, say a call room, you see that the room is used 3 hours per day. Well, if both are controlled by traditional lighting switches, the second one is wasting much more electricity than the first. You can use this information to prioritize installing motion sensing office light switches in the second one and get a faster return on your investment.

Similar to how you can better manage your lighting, meeting room scheduling software can also help you better manage your heating and cooling costs. If your meeting rooms are on a special zone on your HVAC system, you or your team can adjust the settings so that the room isn’t being heated or cooled on days or during times when the room isn’t in use. Whether you go with motion-sensing activators, or you schedule the system to kick on and off according to usage patterns, the data you get from your meeting room scheduling software can help you save money on your heating and cooling systems while also helping to reduce your carbon footprint.