When you walk into the Rekluse shop, you notice the paintâstark white walls and a gray floorâ and you think, âThis
Building Efficiency For Commercial Construction
Idaho Power Helps Motorcycle Parts Manufacturer Keep Jobs at Home In a time when American companies are exporting jobs, motorcycle autoclutch maker Rekluse recently moved into a new manufacturing facility in Boise, Idaho. “We faced the same problems other American companies do,” noted Joe DeGano, the company’s sales and marketing manager, “rising manufacturing costs, labor costs, machine costs, power, everything.” Yet, even with those cost-induced hurdles, Rekluse vowed to remain an American manufacturer. “We don’t export jobs; we export clutches,” Joe said proudly. “We’re the only performance auto-clutch supplier in the world. We have a worldwide distribution network, and we’re the 2012 Small Business Administration Exporter of the Year. It’s pretty amazing.”
The project
A new-look factory When you walk into the Rekluse shop, you notice the paint—stark white walls and a gray floor— and you think, “This place could use an interior designer.” Then Dwayne Dayley, the Rekluse
To keep its plants onshore, Rekluse had to think “skinny” when it moved into its new Boise facility. “We reinvented our factory with all the lean manufacturing principles,” Joe said. “State-of-the-art tools, pod work stations, and operational efficiencies. And Idaho Power helped us with a lot of them.”
Operations Manager, points up at the skylights
Through Idaho Power’s Building Efficiency program, Rekluse revamped its facility with the following:
Continued on back.
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Ceiling skylights with photocells that cycle the interior lights off or on depending how much sunlight is coming into the building
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New, high-efficiency lighting
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Sensors that turn off lights when rooms are vacant
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A new, quiet air compressor with a variable frequency drive (VFD) that reduces power usage
in the ceiling. “The color scheme, or lack of it,” he says, “bounces the natural light back into the room.”
“We don’t export jobs; we export clutches.”
www.idahopower.com/business
– Joe DeGano Sales and Marketing Manager Rekluse “The point is,” Joe noted, “if we can manage our costs and maintain quality, we can keep jobs in Idaho.”
The savings “We doubled the number of machines and square footage in this new plant,” Joe said, “but our power usage has remained pretty much the same.” At a cost of $46,444, the four phases of the project are estimated to reduce Rekluse’s overall power usage by more than 91,000 kilowatt-hours (kWh) per year and its annual power bill by just over $5,000. The project also qualified for $5,873 in incentives. Following are the estimated savings from the Rekluse Building Efficiency project.* Project Cost Idaho Power Incentive $46,444
$5,873
Savings (kWh/year)
Annual Savings
91,008
$5,005
* Source: Idaho Power Building Efficiency project summary for Rekluse.
A new-look factory (cont.) On the floor, lathes and saws cut aluminum bars into small blocks. Milling machines that
Uncommon savings are quite common
sculpt the blocks into parts sit in pods of three,
Saving energy has always been a smart business decision. Now, Idaho Power makes it attainable. Our complete suite of energy efficiency programs provides attractive incentives to commercial and industrial customers who want to use energy more effectively.
with one worker assigned to each pod. “In the
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The Building Efficiency program helps offset the additional capital costs when a company upgrades its planned lighting, cooling, controls, and building-shell designs in favor of more efficient components.
• The Custom Efficiency program offers substantial incentives to large commercial and industrial customers who invest energy-saving improvements in their facilities. • Easy Upgrades provides financial incentives to commercial and industrial customers who implement qualified energy-saving measures in their facilities. •
FlexPeak Management offers commercial and industrial customers incentives in the form of recurring payments for reducing their power consumption during times of overall peak demand.
The above success story was produced in cooperation with, and approval from, Rekluse.
old scheme,” Dwayne says, “we had one guy on one machine. Today, we have one guy running three machines. Eight staffers do the work of twelve.”
How much can your company save? For more information about Idaho Power’s energy efficiency incentive programs, go to www.idahopower.com/business. We’ll show how you can join smart companies like Rekluse, saving energy and money.
