We take care to choose our suppliers, trying to find friendly people who can provide good value, are fair employers and minimise environmental impact.
Please feel free to get in contact with them – you can say we sent you!
ECO-FRIENDLY Office & Cleaning supplies
We use Klee Paper for a lot of our supplies such as recycled paper and stationary, recycled handtowels, eco cleaning supplies etc. They are lovely people to deal with and very helpful sourcing special requests.
ECO-FRIENDLY Cleaning supplies
We also shop in Natural Choice in Paul Street Shopping Centre – check out their new website…
ELECTRICIAN
Roy O’Connor of ROCLEC and his team are superb electricians. Roy is also a great networker and the man to talk to if you are in need of skilled and reliable people in any are of construction of maintenance. 086 8757998
ENERGY
Our electricity is supplied by Airtricity and our gas is supplied by Electric Ireland. Grace at Energy Options (grace@energyoptions.ie) reviews our bills each year and helps us change suppliers to avail of the best rates available.
FIRE SAFETY
It’s unnerving to discover how many people working in the area fire extinguishers have no accreditation (and, quite frankly, are not doing what they say they are). We are relieved to have found Brian O’Riordan of OR Safety Group, a company who pride themselves in their attention to detail. They also offer Fire Training and First Aid Training.
Our fire alarm is maintained by Safety Tech Fire.
INSURANCE
We have negotiated a competitive price with Event Insure .
IT Data storage
In 2012 we decommissioned 2 very old servers we’d inherited from Cork 2005 and installed Network Attached Storage instead – we are anticipating that our energy bills will drop significantly and hoping the investment will pay for itself in less than 3 years. We went with a Q-Nap NAS-Box, which is friendly to both PCs and Macs and doubles as a cloud server and CCTV monitoring station.
IT MAINTENANCE
We have built up a great relationship with Bernard Cotter of BC IT Services who give us good deal on year-round maintenance – he knows our system (which we inherited form Cork 2005) and always does his best to find appropriate solutions for us.
OFFICE EQUIPMENT
Our Samsung photocopier/printer/scanner is maintained by Sharptext who are always on call whenever we have a problem with it.
PLUMBER
We find John P Neary is an excellent plumber who will always help us find cost effective solutions and never tries to sell us things we don’t need.
RECYCLING
After the City Council privatised their service we moved all our recycling waste management to Rehab Recycle.
SANITARY
OCS put their prices down last year without being asked and gave us a credit note instead of a bill – imagine!
SECURITY
Top Guard provide us with a cost-effective alarm-monitoring and patrol service and have been pleasant to deal with. Our intruder alarms are maintained by Deady Security who are very responsive to queries.
STAFF
We have benefitted greatly over the years from the help of wonderful staff members who have been provided by Cork City Partnership under the Tús Work Placement Scheme.
TELEPHONE
We have recently moved our VOIP phone account and system maintenance to 2Tel. After fairly drawn out teething problems the system is running smoothly and is extermely cost-efficient.
WATER
It’s got to be said Cork city’s water doesn’t taste great … we have purchased a Bibo water filter and boiler from Cork company Aquafria that makes it taste much better and filters all we can drink at a competitive price. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to take out fluoride. The Bibo’s boiler and storage seems to be making a difference to our electricity usage since we installed it in June 2014.
WEB
Our webhosting is with Blacknight – the support they have given us in the past was superb, going beyond the call of duty to help.