HINTS & TIPS

5 money-saving hacks for your zoo or aquarium

5 money-saving hacks for your zoo or aquarium
In: HINTS & TIPS

In the last article, I outlined my four-step process for cutting costs within a zoo or aquarium without compromising animal welfare. If you followed along and created a saving for your business — well done! I'm really happy it's helped.

Oh, you want more? You keen little sausage.

Well, these next four ideas can be implemented straight away for maximum benefit. They're real-world examples that I've personally used to save money without impacting animal welfare or visitor experience. Apply them to your business, and you'll be hailed as a money-saving magician. You bloody legend.

1. Less is more.

I'm a bit of teapot. I love a good cuppa. But if I told you I had a fancy kettle to boil my water to 200C, you'd likely (and rightly) think me mad. If you want to make a hot cup of tea, you heat water to 100C (or 212F for our imperial friends), because that's the temperature you need to boil water. Heating it to 200C will not make it "more boiled", it'll just use more energy and achieve the same result.

At a commercial scale, aquarium water is often cleaned using high-pressure sand filters. Water is pumped through a bed of sand, and the suspended particulates (or less delicately, the small pieces of food and poo) become trapped within the sand and are removed from the water. As the filter becomes saturated, the internal pressure of the filter increases, indicating that it needs to be cleaned. This is achieved by pushing water backwards through the filter, fluidising the sand and lifting the particulates away (creatively termed "backwashing").

While working at an aquarium in a previous role, I was astonished by the unusually high water consumption at the attraction. One of the larger exhibits was consuming 7.2 million litres of water each year! After a bit of digging, it turned out that the pressure gauges on these sand filters had long been broken. In place of a pressure reading, these filters were being backwashed every day to ensure they were kept clean, causing water consumption over and above what was needed. The broken pressure gauges were replaced, and the backwash process was re-written to use filter pressure, rather than time, as a cue for backwashing.

For an investment in replacement gauges of just £180, we reduced the frequency of backwashes by 63%, saving a total of 4.5 million litres of water and £16,435 each year.

2. Embrace curiosity.

While curating an attraction in mainland Europe, I was asked to sign one of the regular invoices for animal food; the aquarium would order 40 bags of live shrimp per week, at a cost of €1 per bag — that's 520 bags each quarter, or €520. I know that sounds pretty reasonable, and it's not a bad price, but for the life of me I couldn't think of a single animal in the building that needed to eat live shrimps! I was pretty new to the business, so I might have had missed something... but I'm painfully inquisitive, so I queried it with the team.

Rather perplexingly, it turned out that there were indeed no animals that needed to eat live shrimps!? The aquarium used to display scorpionfish and stonefish, but they'd been moved to another aquarium years ago, and nobody had cancelled the order. As it transpired, these "surplus" live shrimp were being fed to regular fish around the aquarium as a treat, rather than being fed to fussy eaters as a dietary necessity. And as treats go, €2080 a year is a tad steep. Obviously, we cancelled the order.

Curiosity might have killed the cat, but it probably saved it a lot of cash, too!

3. Be more like Martin.

Martin Lewis, of MoneySavingExpert fame, might spend the bulk of of his time appearing on the kind of TV programmes that make you want to sit in a dark room and scream into a cushion, but he does actually talk a lot of sense.

If you're trying to save cash as a homeowner, the first thing Martin the MoneySavingExpert will tell you to do is to call your energy provider and negotiate. In a business where water and energy consumption are the biggest numbers on the balance sheet, this should be an annual event for zoo and aquarium leadership!

But once you've hustled your way to a cheaper gas or electricity bill, you can take the core idea and apply it to everything: switch your utility supplier, sure, but shop elsewhere for your animal food; find a new vendor for latex gloves, get a quote from another cleaning contractor, and the list goes on. So go further. Be cheeky. Call your current suppliers and ask them for better rates. Call a competing supplier and see what they can offer you. You'll be surprised what new suppliers are prepared to do if you switch to them, or likewise what your existing supplier might do if you agree not to switch away from them.

I used this idea a few years ago to change a supplier of synthetic sea salt; we'd been paying around £1200 per tonne for salt, at a consumption of about 55 tonnes per year. At a total cost of £66,000, even a small reduction would save a considerable amount of money. After a few hours of work and a couple of phone calls, I had two quotes in my inbox: the incumbent supplier offering a "loyalty discount" of 5%, for a cost of £1140 per tonne; and a new supplier quoting me £975 per tonne! After some encouraging lab tests and a small trial order, we took the cheaper option and created an annual saving of £12,375. Mental.

4. Notice everything.

Not long ago, I was in the midst of my four-step process (click here if you missed it) in an attempt to find some efficiencies and save money at a medium-sized aquarium. I was following step two, "exploring the facts", and I'd spent my day shadowing the team, asking questions, and trying to gain a deeper understanding of the curatorial operation.

I was walking back to the office, and it was a pretty busy day, so I ducked into one of the plant rooms to make some quick notes about the Amazonia system. This was a group of 7 or 8 tropical freshwater tanks, for a total connected water volume of around 25,000 litres, filtered centrally in a small plant room. I had a poke around and saw that both thermostats on the two in-line heaters were set to 30 degrees Celsius, which seemed a little high. I wrote all of this down, calculating as I went. It takes around 160,000kWh each year to maintain 25,000 litres of water at 30C, at a cost of roughly £24,000.

And here's the thing, it's completely unnecessary! Amazonian fish, like most animals, experience seasonal temperature changes and are just as happy at 24C as they are at 30C. If that's the case, then we're heating the system 6C higher than we need to, and it takes a shit tonne of energy to heat 25,000 litres of water by 6 degrees!

Over the next few days, we slowly decreased the thermostats on the water heaters, being careful not to shock the animals, and eventually settled on a temperature of 25C. This reduced the energy demand by 52,000kWh each year, for a total annual saving of £15,790.

5. Time is money.

You might not know this... but I'm a millennial. There, I said it! What a weight off. I've always been fascinated with the pre-PC days, though; aside from a love of Nandos and the ability to use TikTok, we aren't that different from our Vinyl-era elders. And when I think back to those Betamax years, I'm baffled by the changes brought about through the automation of everyday tasks. In times gone by, last-minute road trips would be planned by hand with a map and a pencil; thanks to the SatNav revolution, us millennials just punch in the address, jump on the road, and put those reclaimed hours to better use — ignorant of the frustrating and impossible task of folding away a comically large A-to-Z.

In a previous role, I was responsible for moving the business to a new piece of software for recording and storing aquarium data, set to replace the mammoth Excel spreadsheets of old. Although it wasn't the primary reason, this also presented a unique opportunity: the chance to automate parts of the data recording and data entry process.

In an aquarium, water tests and temperature checks take hours each day to complete; over the course of a year, that really starts to add up. As an example, the process for daily temperature checks goes something like this:

The recordkeeping software we eventually switched to is accessible using a desktop PC as you'd expect, but also through an app with a smartphone. At one aquarium, we made use of this smartphone functionality to optimise our workflow. The process for taking and recording temperature data now looked like this:

This small change to our workflow created a saving of 10 minutes per day, so we used the app to automate other parts of our daily processes and created a further daily saving of 15 minutes, for a total saving of 25 minutes each day.

By implementing this software across the attraction, and automating parts of the data entry process, we saved 175 minutes per week, for a grand total of 150 hours each year — time that was put to better use, adding real value to the business instead of moving numbers between notepads and spreadsheets.


Together, these five examples saved a total of £46,000 and 150 hours of staff time each year. So if your business is feeling the pressure of the pandemic, or if you just want a leaner and more cost-efficient curatorial operation (who doesn't), then identifying and removing waste should be the first place you start. To recap:

  • Keep an eye on water and electricity consumption to look for anomalies; it's a great indication of processes deviating from the norm.
  • Update your diet sheets frequently, and adjust your food orders to suit — don’t order specialist or expensive food unless it's absolutely necessary.
  • Check heating/cooling systems are set appropriately, otherwise you’re wasting money achieving an unnecessary temperature.
  • Change suppliers regularly! Quality and consistency are important, but that shouldn’t come at the cost of, well, cost.
  • Optimise your processes to make the best use of staff time — invest in automation and it will pay dividends.

If you've already used one of the ideas above, or if you've created savings at your zoo or aquarium in another way, leave a comment below and we can all learn together — sharing your story might just inspire someone else to follow in your footsteps!

ℹ️
First posted on LinkedIn, 31 August 2020
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