The carbon impact of working from home

Back in September, we published our annual environment report and wrote a short blog on it to share our ideas with you. The thing we struggled with however was working out how to calculate our carbon impact of working from home, which we now all do.  We couldn't find any benchmarks so we gave it our best shot and invented a (very) simple spreadsheet to help us out. 

We put it out there to start a conversation - and so we were thrilled when Scott Restrick, an old friend of SE2 and Technical and Training Manager at Energy Action Scotland, got in touch with his two penneth worth.  He's agreed to let us share his thoughts on this blog:

Both my wife and I work from home a day a week, not the same day I might add. However there are some weeks where this is just not practical and for whatever reason there can be times when neither of us managed to work from home all week.

It is always a challenge to define working hours when you are working from home. As you don’t have the travel element of work, you often start earlier and end later, the idea of having an 8 hour “shift” is just not something that happens. That aside here are a few observations which you may have already considered:

1. Space heating may not be required in daylight hours for large parts of the year. Assuming a normal working pattern of between 8am – 6pm this could easily fall out with the need for space heating that would be in addition to your normal domestic demand pattern. Thus it’s probably an overestimation to pro rata space heating energy use by the floor area you utilise for business purposes.
2. Your water heating load will increase, but not by much, this assumes that the requirement for hot water is not a business critical need? Washing your hands and the odd cup or two is not going to significantly impact on your water heating energy requirements.
3. Appliance energy use will go up, but not by as much as you might think. If you are like me, you will probably work from a laptop which uses considerably less energy than even a basic entry level desktop equivalent. Did you turn off your router when you worked away from home? If not, then being at home is not likely to significantly increase the energy requirement of staying in touch with the rest of the world. We worked out that the biggest culprit in increasing electrical usage was the kettle, probably getting boiled an added 8-10 times per day (obviously a jug kettle and only filled for one or two cups).
4. Lighting energy – this is highly sensitive to the time of year and how far north you are. But for the most part again in daylight hours, you probably don’t need it for large parts of the year . If you do you seriously need to have a look at the colour of your blinds/curtains or get your eyesight checked.
5. The carbon footprint of a Google search: if you really want to get all inclusive about this, then perhaps you need to account for the energy requirement for web based services? I think Google stated a few years back that it cost 0.2g of CO2 per search on their systems. They claimed others like You Tube were closer to 1g per 10 mins of video streaming. But that would probably be going well beyond the necessary.
6. Travelling – the commute to your study emits zero carbon, do you account for the savings in transport emissions that all staff are now not contributing too?

I think the best benchmark is if you have consumption data from the previous few years that you can compare with current consumption. If it falls within a 5-10% margin, then you can probably put that down to variations in external temperature year on year. Working at home clearly increases your energy demand, there is no doubt about that, however it is probably an over simplification to just pro rata that total energy by a rough estimation of the proportion of your home temporarily turned over to your business needs.

We'll be taking this on board when we prepare our next report and would love to hear what you think.  Why not drop us a tweet to @se2_rachael  or email me with deeper thoughts at rachael.mills@se-2.co.uk.