HOW MUCH ENERGY DO YOUR MACHINES USE WHEN YOU’RE CLOSED? It is all too easy to leave industrial machinery in a live operating condition between shifts. But according to a new analysis, this practice could be costing UK manufacturers hundreds of millions of pounds on their energy bills every year. FourJaw Manufacturing Analytics calculates that UK manufacturers lost up to £408m in 2025 by failing to power down their machines when their factories were closed. FourJaw’s analysis – which draws on its own machine monitoring data as well as other sources including the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero – suggests that machinery left idling when not in use wastes up to 1.8TWh of electricity every year. This accounts for about 0.64% of the UK’s electricity usage, and would be enough to power around 500,000 British homes for a year. FourJaw – founded in 2020 as a spinout from the University of Sheffield’s Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre – believes that the failure to isolate machinery between shifts is a major cause of wasted energy in UK factories. Its analysis shows that the issue primarily affects around 180,000 small and medium-sized manufacturers that operate single-shift production schedules without implementing off-shift switch-off policies. This is a particularly costly issue for UK manufacturers because they pay around twice the average EU price for energy. FourJaw estimates that UK manufacturers spent about £14.7bn on electricity in 2025, with more than half of this being used to power production machinery. “Traditionally, manufacturers left machines idling off-shift because they considered it better than powering them off and on again,” points out FourJaw’s CEO, Chris Iveson. “This approach is wasteful when applied to all machinery – particularly given the high energy costs now. “Most large manufacturers have implemented systems to monitor machinelevel consumption that allow them to compare the cost of a warm-up run with several hours of idling and take the most cost-effective course of action,” Iveson adds. “But it is SME manufacturers running single-shift operations that have most to gain from powering down machinery when not in use. Idling energy use may seem small, but at a typical 50kWh per machine per week in a single-shift factory, that’s £450 in unnecessary spend per machine per year. Iveson reports that new regulations compelling manufacturers to calculate perunit carbon emissions have driven the use of machine-level productivity and energy data. “We see manufacturers using this data to inform how they manage machines off-shift and making big savings and sustainability gains doing so.” FourJaw has a vested interest in persuading manufacturers to take a closer look at how much energy their machines are using – it offers a plug-and-play machine-monitoring platform for machines of any brand or age. The system is currently being used by more than 160 manufacturers around the world. So the relatively simple practice of switching off machinery when it is idle could have a significant impact on UK manufacturers’ energy bills, especially for SMEs. Tony Sacks, Editor n COMMENT
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