Close the doors, cash up, set the alarm – and the meter keeps running. Every hospitality site has a level of energy use that never switches off, even when nobody’s on the premises.
That’s baseload: the electricity a building draws around the clock, night after night, regardless of whether it’s serving a single customer. Most operators have no idea how big theirs is, because a monthly bill only shows a total – never the shape of the usage underneath it.
What’s Actually Running at 3am
In a typical restaurant, pub or hotel kitchen, a lot stays powered through the night:
- Walk-in fridges and freezers, running continuously by design
- Bottle coolers and back-bar refrigeration
- Ice machines and beer line coolers
- Water heaters and immersion systems on standby
- POS systems, routers and CCTV left on
- Extraction fans or air handling units that never got switched off after close
Some of that is essential — you can’t turn off a walk-in freezer overnight. But according to industry benchmarking on UK commercial energy use, refrigeration and HVAC-related systems are consistently among the biggest drivers of baseload in food and hospitality sites, and much of it runs longer than it needs to simply because nobody’s watching it after hours.
Why It’s Easy to Miss
A standard monthly bill shows one number. It can’t tell you whether your usage overnight looks like a flat line that should be near zero, or a stubborn plateau that never drops.
Half-hourly consumption data changes that. It shows the actual shape of a site’s energy use across the day and night, which is exactly what’s needed to spot when overnight load is higher than it should be, or when it creeps up over time without anyone noticing.
Finding and Fixing It
- Pull half-hourly data if your meter supports it, and look specifically at the hours between close and open
- Do a closing walkthrough: extraction, ovens, non-essential lighting and any equipment left “on” rather than truly off
- Fit timers on anything that doesn’t need to run 24/7 – signage, some lighting circuits, non-critical equipment
- Leave safety-critical cooling alone, but check door seals and thermostat settings, since a faulty seal can push a fridge’s overnight draw up significantly
What This Means for Hospitality Operators
Baseload waste doesn’t show up as one big mistake. It builds up quietly, night after night, and by the time it’s visible on a bill it’s already cost months of margin.
See Your Overnight Usage
disruptmyenergybill brings your contracts, usage and emissions data together in one place, so you can see exactly what your site draws overnight – not just what it costs at the end of the month. The free calculator takes just 60 seconds to show where your energy is going.
