How many are your works, Lord!
In wisdom you made them all;
the earth is full of your creatures.
There is the sea, vast and spacious,
teeming with creatures beyond number—
living things both large and small.
Psalm 104
Holy Trinity church has made some huge reductions in energy use and advocated for local environmental improvements.
Highlights of our Environmental Impact Reductions
Holy Trinity church has made really significant reductions in energy use by making a series of small changes to our buildings.
Electricity use down 50%
We made one simple change during Covid and saved 6500kWh per year – enough to use a washing machine 13,000 times. What was this simple change? We replaced a water heater which had a faulty thermostat.
Gas use down 45% since peak
The year before Covid, our gas use peaked at 85,000kWh. As we emerged from Covid we made a simple change which reduced our gas use by 45%. Our heating used to come on at 2am, to warm the building in time for the morning service. We began to use a digital thermostat to step up the heating. At 3am, the temperature is set to 11 degC, at 7:30am it steps to 16 degC. At 10 am it steps to 18.5 degC. The service starts at 11am and at 11:10 the thermostat steps to 19 degC. Our digital thermometer tells us it is normally one to one and a half degrees warmer in the building than where he thermostat sits. The heating goes off around the end of the service and the residual heat keeps us warm during refreshments.
Other small changes
We have fitted cavity wall and loft insulation to our church hall and installed a control HIVE.
We have introduced wildflowers for our pollinators, a bird box and asked the council not to use weedkiller on our close churchyard.
Local Living Environment Engagement
Church members remove litter from the street as we walk to and from church.
We have attended meetings at a new waste-to-power plant in our parish. We have asked questions about potential pollution, after watching a BBC documentary on local pollution from waste-to-power plants. We asked about increased traffic, noise pollution, dust from the storage of incinerator bottom ash (IBA), rats and flies and smell. We were satisfied that measures had been taken to reduce or eliminate these potential sources of pollution. We produced a report on the risk of smell which may have influenced the design of a double door system and airlock where lorries dump waste into the silo.
We have written to the council when the wildflowers along the path beside our local tram system were strimmed in May 2025 after many years of being allowed to flourish. 2026 has seen a more sensitive approach by the council to wildlife along the path.
We have planted around 20 new oak, ash and chestnut trees in an area of unmanaged forest next to the church school.
Church members have been encouraged to use the ECOSIA search engine, which gives 80% of all income to sponsor tree planting initiatives around the world and does better than Net Zero Carbon having installed 100% more solar power than it uses.
The Future
In 2021, we began a re-ordering project to increase our accessibility, visibility and flexibility whilst reducing the cost to the planet and our pockets for heating and lighting the building.
We have undertaken a feasibility report on our building services and are working towards replacing our three, 30 year old gas boilers, which are 73% efficient, with a hybrid system using solar panels, batteries, two air source heat pumps, infrared and a new 98% efficient gas boiler. We are also in discussion with our local council, who are developing a new local heat network with surplus heat from the new waste-to-power plant. We are also seriously considering insulating the roof of our Victorian church building to reduce heat loss.