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One of the primary reasons why companies choose Billi is our pledge to help the environment. Unlike other traditional water systems such as kettles or coolers, Billi systems use far less energy. Less energy means less Co2. Our commercial range of taps provides chilled, boiling, sparkling and ambient water at the touch of a button, without the need to boil the kettle or constantly cool water. The carefully selected components that go into making our taps mean we achieve a very low carbon footprint. If your business is looking to transition into one that is more sustainable, a Billi water system is a good place to start. Make an environmentally conscious choice, and you’ll see the rewards not only financially, but also in terms of productivity and motivation of your staff.
High-quality drinking water is often overlooked in the office environment. Boiling and chilled filtered drinking water raises morale, increases concentration, cuts downtime, maintains hydration, stimulates creativity and keeps staff healthy. Happy and healthy staff alone may not make you want to switch, so let’s take a look at the other benefits.
Space – We understand the pressures of office design. With London office rent per square foot averaging from £60-£80, space is money. That’s why we’ve developed our unique under counter technology, specifically with small spaces in mind. With a focus on space saving, Billi systems are often less than half the size of comparative products. This allows the most economical use of under counter space.
Energy – Saving energy means saving money, that’s why we’re so committed to cutting our energy usage and CO2. Unfortunately, chilling water creates waste heat energy. As Billi systems provide chilled water, one issue our designers were faced with was excess heat energy. To combat this, we created something new in energy efficient appliance design. Billi systems use thermodynamic heat-exchange technology that allows a large amount of heat to be absorbed and stored. This heat is generated during the chilling cycle and is usually wasted to the atmosphere. Billi however, recovers this waste heat energy to preheat the boiling water enabling our systems to achieve substantial energy savings.
By harnessing the waste heat generated by the chilled water cooling cycle, we reuse it to preheat the water entering the hot water tank. This design provides a massive CO2 energy saving compared to conventional boiling and chilled units. As well as our innovative heat-exchange technology, other features on the Billi systems also help save energy.
Our 7 day time switch ensures the system is running only when it is needed, eliminating unnecessary out of hours power consumption. There is also an energy saving mode that can be activated after a certain amount of time of non-use. In energy saving mode, the Billi unit powers down to conserve energy.
Time – In a working environment, time is precious. With a Billi system, precious time is not wasted waiting for the kettle to boil, or water to cool. We have a variety of different combinations based on the required number of people our system is going to service.
Boiling Delivery 90-250 cups per hour
Chilled Delivery 60-175
Sparkling Delivery 60-120
This is a battle you’ve probably considered before if you’re reading this. The kettle vs. boiling tap debate. The problem with kettles are as follows. They are time-consuming to boil. How many minutes have you spent in the office waiting for the kettle to boil? Even worse, when somebody has boiled the kettle, and there’s not quite enough water to go round. Then the kettle has to be boiled all over again. Usually, however, when people boil kettles, they actually over-fill it. As a nation, we tend to boil around twice as much water as we actually need. When you look at the figures and realise we’re drinking around 165m cups of tea and 70m cups of coffee each day. We’re wasting around 3,525 tonnes of CO2 every day.
With a Billi tap, you can never “over-fill” or “under-fill” it. A Billi system can continuously provide hot, chilled, ambient or sparkling water. Refer to the delivery figures mentioned above to find out just how many cups a Billi system can produce an hour. You cannot waste water or energy when using a boiling tap, as it produces as much or as little water as you need.
As they use less energy, and prevent waste water, boiling taps also work out cheaper per litre. A boiling tap costs on average 1p per litre, or 9p per day depending on the size of your workforce. Alternatively, electric kettles average at 1.70p per litre, almost double the cost! The cost of boiling a full kettle, typically holding 1.5 litres – is around 2.5p per boil according to Npower.
Hot drinks can make up a rather large part of your carbon footprint believe it or not. Whatever you drink, if you’re having it white, or with milk, your carbon footprint is going to be high. Typically, milk in your drinks accounts for two-thirds of the total carbon footprint of your beverage. Boiling the water, growing the tea or coffee, and cultivating it still create less CO2 than the milk in your drink. Unfortunately, this is due to the fact cows are incredibly bad for the environment, producing a huge amount of methane.
21g CO2e: black tea or coffee, boiling only the water you need
53g CO2e: white tea or coffee, boiling only the water you need
71g CO2e: white tea or coffee, boiling double the water you need
235g CO2e: a large cappuccino
340g CO2e: a large latte
The obvious way to cut down on your carbon footprint is to cut out milk in your drinks. Switch to green tea! There’s plenty of health benefits. If you can’t do that, why not reduce the number of coffees or teas you have a day. Alternatively, cut down on your carbon footprint by switching to a Billi tap. This way you won’t overfill the kettle! If you boil more water than you need, you could easily add 20g to the carbon footprint of each drink. Boiling excess water wastes time, money and carbon. Switching to Billi means you’ll save money and the environment. A logical choice.