Saint Kevin’s is a large school situated in the beautiful town of Greystones. We have over 450 pupils and 35 hard working staff members! We received our first Green Flag two years ago and are aiming to get our second this year. We are focusing on reducing the amount of energy we use both in school and at home.
Our first step was to collect all our electricity and gas bills for the last two years and see what we could learn. We decided that the best way to track how much energy we were using was to look at the actual units used instead of the cost of the bills.
Next, we talked to our caretaker and asked him to show the committee where the ESB meter is. We decided that we should keep a record of the number of units we used each week. Our caretaker kindly agreed to take a reading first thing on Monday morning and last thing on a Friday evening. Before we started we ran a ‘Switch it off’ and a ‘Close it’ Campaign and poster competition.
We printed out a sheet with a grid for him to fill in and hung it beside the meter. We have a chart on our Green Schools’ Notice-board and we write the results up every week. So far we are delighted with our results.
We think this is a really good way of keeping an eye on how much energy we use!