Church Premises

Energy use

Auditing your energy use

A good place to start is to do an audit of how you use energy in the church, and what you are already doing to conserve it. This will help you to identify where your resources will be best used to reduce the church's carbon footprint. You can do this yourself using this simple checklist produced by the Church of England (scroll to pages 15-16 of the document for the checklist). There are two engineers in 4c so we may be able to help you with this, please get in touch on via our Contact Us page if you would be interested. Or, you can employ a professional to do a more thorough audit. Click here for an example of an energy report completed by the Church of the Good Shepherd in Cambridge- this report includes a lot of information which may be transferable to other churches, eg. information on secondary glazing and destratification fans.

Reducing your energy use

Measures to reduce your energy use are not always costly, some may even be free. Some things you may like to consider are:

• Draught excluders;
• Secondary glazing;
• Adjusting heating controls;
• Improved lighting efficiency;
• Reflective panels behind radiators.

More in-depth advice, specific to churches, is available from:

• Eco-congregations "Greening the Church Building", free to download.
• 'Shrinking the Footprint' toolkit for reducing energy use in churches. Free to download. Don't be put off by the complicated title when you open it, this is a useful document.
• Resources from the 'Low carbon church buildings ancient and modern' workshop which was run by two 4c members at the Climate of Hope conference:
  • Presentation slides in powerpoint format (12.6MB (clicking this link automatically starts the download of the powerpoint file. It does not take you to another page so it may look like it's not doing anything!)
  • Presentation slides in PDF format (3.1MB)
• Church of the Good Shepherd Energy report. A useful case study, discussing many of these measures in the context of a real church building.

Recycling

Several churches in Leeds have provided recycling facilities for their congregation to make it easy for them to recycle. More details of this are given on the Lifestyle page.

Church land