Meeting House

The Greening or Cotteridge Meeting 

Beginnings

Two years ago, inspired by Laurie Michaelis, Cotteridge Meeting started a Living Witness Group,   The group produced an environmental audit of our meeting house in its first six months.

We already had a  solar hot water heating system  in use on our warden's bungalow.

We could easily address some of the new issues identified, like using more environmentally friendly (Ecover) cleaning products.  We installed recycling bins and bought a Bosch refrigerator with an A+ energy rating.  We now use Evolve recycled paper for our newsletter.

The Meeting House 

We have no gas supply and all heating is electric.  In 2004-5 the meeting house used 41,528 kWh of electricity, mostly in our storage heaters.  Generating this electricity produced 20.7 tons of CO2 (about what 20 people living in India produce in total in a year).  The cost of the electricity (£4,356 at 2007 rates) was more than 10% of our income, meaning we were officially suffering from “fuel poverty”! We changed our electricity supplier to Good Energy, one of the best providers of green electricity.  Nevertheless we urgently needed to reduce our electricity usage.  Click here to see our meeting room before and after improvements.

Lighting

We replaced 18 spotlights (each 150 W) in the meeting room with energy efficient 20 W spotlights, saving 2.34 kW every hour the lights are on.  

Insulation

We had already double glazed most of the meeting house's "glass walls" (admired by Pevsner) with units with an 8 mm gap and low E glass.  We now know these have a U value of 2.7.  When we decided to double glaze some additional large windows, we found we could improve on this result by buying units with a 16 mm gap filled with argon.  These have a U value of 1.2. 

We agreed to "dry line" the solid meeting house walls. 

Heating

When the old storage heaters in the meeting room failed, we decided to install an air sourced heat pump.

Benefits

Taken together the cost of greening the meeting house to date has been about £20,000.  We appear to have reduced our annual electric bill and CO2 emissions by 40%, saving approximately £1,400 but are finding more savings are appearing this winter as we get the benefit for the dry lining installed in August 2007.  This suggests a payback time of 15 years for our improvements to date, but CO2 reductions will be immediate.

The Future

We are currently replacing the glazing in a further 30+ windows (cost c. £8,000) and are hope to replace our nine remaining storage heaters with heat pumps (possibly ground sourced) in the near future (cost c. £10,000).  We also hope to replace our felt roof (poorly insulated) with a “warm roof”.  Finally we hope to install an array of solar photo voltaic panels on the south-facing roof of the classroom block.  These might actually allow us to become "energy neutral"!