It’s entirely up to you! The tool is flexible enough that you can either upload your meter readings each time you take them, or you can upload them all in one go at the end. When you upload your final reading, you’ll be able to find out whether you saved energy during Switch Off Fortnight and see a visualisation of your performance over the three weeks.

You can always change your readings if you find out you have accidentally entered the wrong one. Just click on ‘Change previous readings’ under any of your meter reading entries or ‘Edit Readings’ on your Results page.

This is so we are able to record and aggregate overall energy savings in schools during Switch Off Fortnight, to celebrate everyone’s collaborative achievement. Although you access the Dashboard through the Pod it’s actually created on a separate website and so it requires a new account to be created for your school.

You need to register separately to use the Pod Energy-Saving Dashboard. Your existing Pod login won’t work. See the Q ‘Why do I need to register to use the Dashboard?’

Don’t worry – your username is your email address. And if you’ve forgotten your password, you can use the ‘forgotten password’ link to create a new one.

Yes – but only if you are capturing readings from different meters around the school or have two classes capturing readings, for example. What you can’t do is have more than one login associated with the same meter.

We’ve included 343 local authorities. Start typing and your local authority should appear in a dropdown menu beneath. But if you can’t find your local authority, please pick the nearest to your location.

We only collect enough information for us to be able to understand energy usage across all the schools that take part and to make the tool work for you. All data will be managed in alignment with our Privacy Policy and is stored securely behind a firewall on a professionally provided web server.

It will only be used by Wastebuster and the Pod for the purposes of measuring the amount of energy saved during campaign periods.

Meter readings provide the most accurate way of measuring your school’s energy use. We want both gas and electricity meter readings as this reflects how most schools use energy (typically, gas for central heating and hot water; and electricity for lights and appliances).

Ideally we’d like you to take four weekly meter readings on the following dates for Switch Off Fortnight: 6th, 13th, 20th and 27th November 2022. This is so that you can establish a baseline for your school’s energy use (between 6th – 13th November 2023) and then compare it against your energy use after the start of your Switch Off Fortnight campaign (from meter readings taken on 13th and 20th November) and the second week of your Switch Off Fortnight campaign (from meter readings taken on 20th and 27th November).

Don’t panic if this isn’t possible! The objective is to understand the role of high quality data in measuring and learning about your use of energy.

If you can’t capture the readings on the four Mondays, you can capture four readings on another day of the week instead. Just make sure you’re consistent in taking readings on the same day of the week each time to be the most accurate.
If you can’t capture the readings in November, you can do them over another four-week period instead (again, on the same day each week).

Yes – we need four meter readings to display the energy and carbon savings when you input your last set of meter readings.

Ideally yes, particularly on the same day as you’re only capturing readings on a weekly basis. Try to stick to a similar time too, but don’t worry if you aren’t spot on each week. Don’t panic if either aren’t possible. The objective is to start collecting high quality data so you are measuring your school’s energy use as accurately as possible. So do what you can!

Speak to the facilities manager, office staff, head teacher or school business manager / bursar to find out who’s responsible for managing the meters and where they’re based at school. They’ll also be able to let you know how accessible they are and whether students can locate them, or they can only be accessed by a member of staff.

Don’t worry! To keep things simple, we suggest each teacher be responsible for only one set of meter readings (i.e. one electricity meter and one gas meter). If you have more than one set of meters around school, you can just pick the electricity and gas meters for one building or ask another teacher to be responsible for another set.

Keep it simple by only focusing on one site, or one campus, or even one building for yourself! Don’t make it over complicated by capturing readings from multiple meters. You can ask another teacher to at your school to register so that they can take responsibility for a different set of meters if you want as you can only input readings from one set of meters into the Pod Energy Saving Dashboard.

We only want you to capture the meter readings from one gas meter and one electricity meter. If you only have one meter (e.g. you don’t have any gas) – just take this reading and put zeros in as your entry for the gas meter readings.

Ideally we’d like you to take four weekly meter readings on the following dates for Switch Off Fortnight: 6th, 13th, 20th and 27th November 2023. This is so that you can establish a baseline for your school’s energy use (between 6th – 13th November 2023) and then compare it against your energy use after the start of your Switch Off Fortnight campaign (from meter readings taken on 13th and 20th November) and the second week of your Switch Off Fortnight campaign (from meter readings taken on 20th and 27th November).

Don’t panic! See the answer to the Q ‘Why do we need to take FOUR meter readings?’

You don’t need to! Simply put your four meter readings into the Pod Energy Saving Dashboard and we’ll calculate your energy used over the three weeks for you.

You don’t need to! When you input the last of your four meter readings into the Pod Energy Saving Dashboard, we’ll not only calculate your energy used over the three weeks for you, but also the carbon savings related to this.

Check the meter – it’ll be marked whether it provides readings in cubic meters (m3) or cubic feet (ft3). On the Pod Energy Saving Dashboard you can choose your gas meter type from the dropdown menu.

Don’t worry! First, bear in mind that there could have been unusual factors at play – for instance, if there was any reason the school had to stay open late on an evening, this will have meant more energy use. There might have been a cold weather snap, and so on.

The good news is you’ve now started to measure your school’s energy use. Knowing how much energy you use is the starting point for understanding what influences your energy use – and acting on this to prevent any unnecessary wasting of energy (e.g. lights left on in empty classrooms). We want to encourage everyone to be more conscious about their use of energy because this will mean fewer greenhouse gas emissions, which is good for the planet.

Your results will be stored until Monday 1 November, 2024. You can login at any point until then to retrieve them.

You can continue tracking your energy use over three-week periods by resubmitting your week one results. This will kickstart a new period of tracking, which will clear your previous results. So remember to download these if you want to have a record of your energy data each time.

Once you have entered your four readings, you can download your results as a PDF by clicking the print results button on the results screen, then choose the PDF option.

There is more information about how to do this on a Windows computer here – www.businessinsider.com/how-to-save-a-webpage-as-a-pdf-on-windows.

For Apple Macs there is some further information here – www.lifewire.com/save-web-page-as-pdf-in-safari.