St John’s and All Saints’ have a number of projects under development to reduce our environmental impact, cut down our energy consumption and move us all towards “zero carbon”
All Saints’ has recently installed bicycle parking – so when you take your bike to an event in Landbeach you can feel more secure when you park and lock your bike.
St John’s has just received the Bronze Award under the Eco Church scheme. Eco Church is run by the Charity A Rocha UK and maintains a community of churches that are reducing their environmental impact. Find out more about Eco Church on their web site. Please check out our award certificate. Beyond Bronze lies the Silver and Gold awards – and some of our planned development work will take us to Silver – we hope some time in 2022.
Bicycle parking at St John’s. Thanks to support from the Cambridgeshire Community Foundation through the October Fund, we have been able to study the design options for different arrangements for bicycle parking – but also improved access to the churchyard from the road and car park. The PCC is still mulling over some of the options and we hope to announce a design in the near future. To give you an idea of where we’re headed.
Please take a look at this map for more detail.
Church room heating. St John’s has recently installed a heat pump and solar panels in the Churchroom as a step towards “zero carbon” for the whole Church.
Our gas boiler was 20 years old and life-expired and on the basis of the wider community’s use of the Churchroom we applied for a grant from the South Cambs District Council under their Zero Carbon Communities scheme.
The heat pump sits behind the enclosure which is in part to reduce the visual impact (Diocese of Ely faculty requirement) and the noise impact (South Cambs planning condition).
Here are the solar panels whose overall rated output is 3kW. We’ve been seeing 2.75kW during the recent sunny weather. We’re exporting a lot of this power at present, and we are looking at the need for batteries.
The monitoring system comes from a small company based in Wales (please check their web site). Collection of data and its use in the wider community to spread the knowledge and understanding of new energy schemes is an important objective for us.
Here is a time history showing the heat pump operating during a Monday morning in late Spring (25th April) when we need heating from 9 to 12.
St John’s PCC is most grateful to South Cambridgeshire District Council for a grant made under the Zero Carbon Communities Programme
