The Greening of Cotteridge Meeting House
Between 2004 and 2011 we reduced the actual energy footprint of our all electric meeting house by about 90% from c. 52,000kWh to 5,610kWh. The chart below details our actions, year by year, with our annual energy use in kilowatt hours (kWh). Heating electrically means the average temperature over the winter months (Nov-Feb) has a big impact on our usage. The last two winters have been cold in Britain (very unlike the world average). so it is probably that the potential energy savings of our improvements to our building are closer to 95% or even 100%. If November and December 2011 have temperatures closer to average, we may well achieve 95% savings in 2011.
kWh used in the meeting house annually from 2004 through August 2011:
Reducing
energy use:
In
2004, judging from our bills, our all electric meeting house was using about
52,000kWh of electricity, mostly in our night storage heaters. Following
the double glazing of our "glass walls" this dropped to a bit
under 47,000 kWh in 2004-5. 52,000kWh
of electricity would have been producing 27.5 tons of CO2 (equalling emissions of two round trip flights
from Britain to Australia
or the annual emissions of 20 people
living in
Where we came from:
We already had a solar hot water heating system in use on our warden's bungalow.
In 2005 we:
We started a Living Witness Group with links to the national Quaker group by
this name
Did an energy audit of our building
Agreed to use environmentally
friendly (Ecover) cleaning products.
Installed recycling bins
Bought a
Bosch refrigerator with an A+ energy rating.
Began using recycled paper for newsletters.
Details of what we did to produce the graph above: