It’s easy to get in the habit of paying out of home utility bills without thinking twice. You can save money by reviewing each month’s bill. Two examples.
Electric Bills
Look for large increases in power consumption month to month. You may have a broken light meter. When a Circle City Outdoor power bill had increased 50% we investigated and discovered we had a broken light meter at a sign location causing the lights to stay on 24/7. We fixed the meter and the bill dropped immediately. We also installed Smartlink to remotely monitor and control lighting at several billboards without having to rely on light meters.
Bandwidth Bills
Betsey Hege at Meadow Outdoor noticed that Meadow’s monthly bandwidth charges varied significantly between digital billboards. It turns out that most of Meadow digital billboards were on individual account plans with individual account data purchases. This meant that Meadow was buying way more data than it needed. The solution was to purchase a shared data plan for all the company’s digital signs.
Betsy also noticed that Meadow was being charged for texts to and from signs. A digital billboard shouldn’t have any texting activity so Meadow asked its account executive to remove the texting service from all Meadow’s digital billboard accounts.
By implementing the two changes Meadow cut its digital billboard bandwidth bill by 44%. Great job Betsy!
What have you learned about minimizing your power or bandwidth bills? Email davewestburg@billboardinsider.com or use the form below.
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Once on a billboard I converted from a static to a digital I noticed that other exactly the same single face digital billboards were consuming the same electricity but the bills were 1/2 the cost as the others I had. After months of pleading for the utility company to look into they put a consumption meter on the board and found out that the meter on the board was incorrectly hooked for a 11o service when the application specifically showed a 220 hook up. The 110 metering caused the meter to run twice as fast once the 220 hook up was installed correctly as the original application requested and when the digital was installed.
Once we figured this out the electrical went back to the beginning of my bills after conversion and refactored the charges as they should have been and surprisingly issued me a check for over $4000 since it took so long to get them to look into it.
It just shows that persistence can pay off with utility companies.