Leaving idle machinery switched on ‘is costing UK firms £408m a year’
28 January 2026 
UK manufacturers lost up to £408m in 2025 by failing to power down their machines when their factories were idle, according to a new analysis by FourJaw Manufacturing Analytics.
The analysis – which draws on FourJaw’s own machine monitoring data as well as other sources of information including the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero – suggests that machinery left idling when not in use wastes up to 1.8TWh of electricity every year. This accounts for about 0.64% of the UK’s total electricity usage – enough to power around 500,000 British homes for a year.
FourJaw – founded in 2020 as a spinout from the University of Sheffield’s Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre – believes that the failure to isolate machinery between shifts is a major cause of wasted energy in UK factories. Its analysis shows that the issue primarily affects around 180,000 small and medium-sized manufacturers that operate single-shift production schedules without an off-shift switch-off policy.
The issue is particularly costly for UK manufacturers because they pay around twice the EU average price for their energy. FourJaw estimates that UK manufacturers spent around £14.7bn on electricity in 2025, with more than half of this being used to power production machinery.
“Traditionally, manufacturers left machines idling off-shift because they considered it better than powering them off and on again,” points out FourJaw’s CEO, Chris Iveson. “This approach is wasteful when applied to all machinery – particularly given the high energy costs now.
“Most large manufacturers have implemented systems to monitor machine-level consumption that allow them to compare the cost of a warm-up run with several hours of idling and take the most cost-effective and sustainable course of action,” Iveson adds. “But it is SME manufacturers running single-shift operations that have most to gain from powering down machinery when not in use.
“Idling energy use may seem small, but at a typical 50kWh per machine per week in a single-shift factory, that’s £450 in unnecessary spend per machine per year.”
Iveson reports that new regulations compelling manufacturers to calculate per-unit carbon emissions have driven the use of machine-level productivity and energy data. “We see manufacturers using this data to inform how they manage machines off-shift and making big savings and sustainability gains doing so.”
FourJaw has a vested interest in persuading manufacturers to take a closer interest in how much energy their machines are consuming – it offers a plug-and-play platform that monitor machines of any age or brand. The system is currently used by more than 160 manufacturers around the world, in sectors including aerospace, automotive, energy and food production.
