Sectors — Hotels & Hospitality
A property that runs around the clock, billed by an invoice with no hours on it
A guest checking in at midday and a laundry running at nine in the evening arrive on the same invoice as one number. But under Uganda’s time-of-use tariff they are not the same money. The hour a load runs decides what it costs, and no hotel can manage an hour it cannot see.
Sheraton Kampala Hotel
UGX 36M
saved per year
Sub-metering by tariff band traced a large share of the hotel’s cost to an industrial laundry running through peak hours. The fix was the schedule. No equipment was bought, no service was reduced, and the saving appeared on the next bill.
Your hotel day, priced by the hour
Three tariff bands, one property. Metering shows how much of each department’s consumption lands in each band. That is the only way to tell an unavoidable cost from an avoidable one.
00:00 — 06:00
The cheapest hours you own.
- Laundry, if the shift is scheduled to reach it
- Hot-water storage and calorifier reheat
- Cold rooms pulling temperature down before service
- Pool and borehole pumping
06:00 — 18:00
Standard daytime rate. Where most of the hotel already sits.
- Breakfast and lunch kitchen lines
- Chiller carrying the daytime cooling load
- Conference and banqueting halls in session
- Housekeeping, lifts, back-of-house
18:00 — 00:00
The most expensive hours. Everything here costs the most it can.
- Dinner service and the full kitchen brigade
- Guest floors at highest occupancy — air conditioning, hot water
- Evening functions and hall lighting
- Laundry, when the day ran late and it slipped into the evening
Read this way, a hotel usually finds at least one heavy, genuinely flexible load sitting in the wrong band, not by decision but by routine nobody has revisited.
The same clock decides whether solar is worth building here. A hotel’s heaviest hours fall after sunset, so an array is paid for by the shoulder band: the chiller, the lunch kitchen, the conference floor in session. A system sized from an annual bill will always claim more of the evening than it can reach. Solar project development starts from the metered daytime curve. Where a property needs a single study instead, ahead of a refurbishment or for a brand or lender submission, an energy audit is scoped to the property. The clock itself comes out of monthly energy reporting, a department-by-department read of where the hours went and what they cost.
Where the cost lands, department by department
A general manager holds every head of department to a budget except this one. Nobody can be asked to reduce a cost that arrives without their name on it, and no head of department can defend one either. Sub-metering gives each of them a figure they own.
Rooms division
Usually held by the executive housekeeper
Guest floors, room air conditioning, corridor lighting and the hot water behind them.
Food and beverage
Usually held by the executive chef
Kitchen lines, cold rooms, extraction and dishwashing, across every outlet.
Laundry
Usually held by the laundry manager
Washers, dryers, presses, and the steam or hot water that feeds them.
Engineering and plant
Usually held by the chief engineer
Chillers, boilers, water pumping, lifts and the standby supply.
Conference and banqueting
Usually held by the events manager
Hall lighting and cooling, AV and kitchen support, against the events diary.
Health club and pool
Usually held by the chief engineer
Pool circulation and heating, sauna and gym plant — a small area with a large load.
Read against the clock above, a department’s number stops being a total and becomes a schedule: how much of the laundry landed in peak, whether the kitchen extraction was still running after the last cover, what the pool plant costs to hold overnight. That is the conversation a monthly heads-of-department meeting can actually act on.
Guest comfort is not one of the variables
A hotel sells comfort. An energy recommendation that quietly withdraws it is a revenue decision disguised as a cost decision, and it will cost more than it saves. So every recommendation we bring you comes from above the line below.
Above the line — the parts of the property a guest never experiences
- Back-of-house scheduling
- Plant running when nothing is being served
- Chiller behaviour against real occupancy
- Equipment left on after the function ended
The line — the guest experience itself
Below the line — never proposed, whatever it would save
- Warmer rooms
- Colder water
- Dimmer public areas
- A slower lift
If the only route to a number runs through the guest, we say so rather than recommend it. That is usually the point at which the conversation turns back to the laundry schedule, which is where the money was in the first place.
What we metered at the Sheraton
Seven three-phase meters on the feeds that decide the bill. Each three-phase meter takes three current sensors, so the installation carried twenty-one sensors in total.
Your property will differ. A resort with a large pool plant, a city hotel with a heavy conference calendar, and a lodge on a generator are three different metering plans. The assessment establishes yours before anything is quoted.
- Guest room floors
- Chiller
- Kitchen
- Laundry — line 1
- Laundry — line 2
- Antenna equipment room — conference facility
- Antenna equipment room — rooftop
7 meters · 21 current sensors · installed April 2023
Find out what your hotel’s hours are costing you
An assessment walks the property, identifies the feeds worth metering, and tells you which of them are running in the wrong tariff band. Some of what it finds costs nothing to fix.
We reply within one business day. No sales pressure.