Business gas for car garages and workshops

Workshop gas use is dominated by space heating across large floor areas. Radiant tube heaters, warm-air units, and overhead radiant. Add paint baking ovens on body shops, hot water for valeting, and customer-area heating in dealerships, and the bill can rival mid-sized factories. Standard small-business gas tariffs price for offices, not for radiant-heated industrial bays. We compare suppliers across the open UK market with workshop heating profiles in mind.

The mechanics of switching gas are the same as for any commercial site. We cover them in our guide to switching business gas. But workshop-specific questions matter: how the contract handles seasonal heating peaks, whether your paint baking oven volume justifies a different contract structure, and how multi-site dealer groups consolidate across regions.

Our wider business gas service covers the whole UK market. For garages we also look at the boundary between commercial workshop gas and any forecourt domestic supply, biomethane options for dealerships with manufacturer sustainability targets, and CCL treatment.

Paint baking ovens and the volume question

Body shops with paint baking ovens use significantly more gas than service-only workshops. If you’ve ramped up paint volume. Added a second oven, picked up a new manufacturer contract. Your usage profile may have grown past the threshold where a different contract structure becomes worthwhile. We resize the contract on actual current AMR data with sensible flex for variation.

Multi-site dealer groups

For dealer groups operating across multiple sites, consolidating gas onto one supplier unlocks volume tiering. You also get unified billing and one renewal cycle. Useful when the group finance team is reconciling twenty sites every month. We model consolidated against keeping each dealership on its own renewal so the FD sees the saving before deciding.

EV transition and the heating-only future

As workshops shift toward EV servicing, the gas bill stays roughly the same (heating doesn’t change) but the wider energy mix shifts. The gas contract you sign now should still suit you in 3–5 years when EVs are a bigger share of work. We model contract length against your transition plan so you’re not locked into something irrelevant when service work patterns change.

How a workshop gas switch works with us