Energy and water are the two largest things a restaurant consumes and the two nobody watches, because both arrive as a single number on a bill weeks after the behaviour that caused them. This topic is about turning that number back into something you can act on — and about the uncomfortable fact that most of what can be fixed here costs nothing and has been available all along.
⚡ Read the bill in kilowatt-hours
Find last month's bill and look past the amount due to the consumption: the kilowatt-hours for electricity, the cubic metres for water, and the same figure for gas if you cook with it. Write those three numbers down somewhere you will see them again, because a single reading is useless and twelve of them are a management tool.
The example restaurant runs at about 13,300 kilowatt-hours and 60 cubic metres in a normal month. Neither figure means much on its own; what makes them useful is dividing by covers. Sixty cubic metres across two thousand covers is thirty litres of water per guest — which includes everything: cooking, washing, cleaning, toilets. That per-cover figure is the one to track, because it separates a busy month from a wasteful one, exactly the way the sales analytics course separated selling more from earning more.
Then find the meters and read them yourself once a week for a month. It takes two minutes and it is the only way to learn something a bill cannot tell you: what the building uses when it is closed. Read the meter at close and again before opening. Whatever moved overnight is being consumed by equipment nobody is using, and in most restaurants that number is bigger than anybody expects.
❄️ The four big consumers, and what each one wants
The share table from the previous topic points at four pieces of equipment. Each has a small set of habits that change its consumption without changing anything a guest experiences.
- Refrigeration never stops, so it rewards attention more than anything else. Seals that actually close — the paper test from the room course works here too — condenser coils cleaned twice a year, nothing hot put inside, doors that do not stand open during a delivery, and a freezer without a coat of frost, which is an insulator working against you.
- Cooking is mostly a switch-on-time problem, and the kitchen course already made this list: stagger start times by station, write them on the opening checklist, and check them again in a month. A grill that comes on two hours before the first order burns two hours of gas every single day of the year.
- Heating and cooling is doors and draughts before it is thermostats. The room course mapped the temperature and found the door and the extraction; the same fixes — a curtain, a vestibule, make-up air — reduce consumption and improve the room at once, which is rare enough to be worth saying.
- Hot water and dishwashing is where the two bills meet, and it hides the single best fix in this course, which is the next section.
One general rule that saves arguments: fix maintenance before buying efficiency. A new high-efficiency fridge next to a dusty condenser and a torn seal will consume more than an old fridge that is properly looked after. The equipment decisions — when to replace, what to look for — belong to the kitchen course, which taught you to ask who cleans it and what happens when it breaks.
💧 Water: the dish area is two-thirds of it
In most restaurants the kitchen sink and the dish area account for the majority of the water, and one component matters more than everything else combined: the pre-rinse spray valve, the hose used to knock food off plates before they go into the machine.
Old ones run at two or three times the flow of a modern one and rinse no better, because what does the work is the pattern and the pressure rather than the volume. Replacing one costs less than a case of wine, takes ten minutes, and is the highest-return object in this entire course. Check yours the crude way: hold it into a bucket for ten seconds and see how much comes out.
After that, the list is habits rather than hardware. Run the dishwasher full, not half — the same rule the cost control course gave for the energy. Scrape instead of rinsing, which is faster anyway. Do not leave a tap running while prepping. Thaw in the fridge overnight rather than under running water, which is also the food safety course's rule, so it is not a trade-off. Check for leaks by reading the water meter when everything is off; a dripping tap and a running toilet are invisible, constant and remarkably large over a month.
Ice machines deserve a line of their own: they consume both water and electricity, they are usually in the hottest part of the building, and moving one somewhere cooler or giving it space to breathe changes its consumption more than anything you can do to it otherwise.
🗓️ What to do this week, and what to plan
Split the list by whether it needs a decision or just a person.
This week, no budget: read the meters and write the numbers down; check every fridge and freezer seal with a sheet of paper; defrost anything with frost in it; clean the condenser coils; stagger the switch-on times and put them on the opening checklist; check the pre-rinse valve with a bucket; walk the building after close and write down everything still running.
This quarter, small money: replace the pre-rinse valve, fix the leaks the meter found, seals for the doors that failed the paper test, and a timer or a smart plug for anything that has no business running overnight.
When something breaks, not before: the efficient replacement. Buying a new fridge to save energy while the old one still works is almost never the right call on any measure — the consumption of manufacturing a new one is real, and the kitchen course's four questions still apply.
And one line about the money, because it will come up: what all of this saves in pesos is the cost control course's arithmetic, which already put energy on its list of four levers. Here the target is the quantity — fewer kilowatt-hours per cover, fewer litres per cover — and the pesos follow on their own.