Restaurant HVAC Setback: The Overnight Utility Leak

It's 1 AM. The dining room is empty. The chairs are up. And your air conditioning is still cooling a room nobody's sitting in, at the same temperature it ran during a full Friday service.

This happens every night in most restaurants. The closer walks out, locks the door, and the thermostat stays exactly where the opening manager set it at 10 AM.

Take a restaurant spending $5,000 a month in utilities. HVAC is roughly 30 to 40% of that number, so $18,000 to $24,000 a year. If your system runs at full capacity 6 to 8 hours a night after you close, you're conditioning an empty building for nearly a third of the day.

Dropping the temperature 8 to 10 degrees during closed hours can cut your annual HVAC cost by around 10%. At the top of that range, on a $24,000 HVAC spend, that's $2,400 back. For doing nothing except programming a thermostat.

Set an occupied schedule that matches your actual operating hours. Set a setback temperature for closed hours. Check it once a season. That's the whole job.

Most restaurants own a programmable thermostat and never program it. It runs on the same setting 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, because the GM who installed it left two years ago and nobody touched it since.Your utility bill isn't a fixed cost. It's a managed cost that most operators stopped managing the day the thermostat went up on the wall.