Dear Friends,
Recently the water heater in the servery broke down (limescale). In the course of chatting with the engineer, I thought I’d find out how much energy it consumes just to have it running on stand-by all the time (as we do).
The answer is about 80p a day. That’s nearly £300 a year.
On top of that, we then have to pay for engineers or services – so add £350 a pop.
And finally, we replace the filters ourselves – so add about £200.
So – we are paying somewhere over £850 a year… The carbon dioxide produced just from that standby is 3 kilowatt hours a day, which equates to about ¼ tonne (227kg) annually – about the same as a flight from London to Rome per person. (For context, the average carbon dioxide or equivalent produced per person in the UK is somewhere over 10 tonnes).
So, we could save a lot of money and a lot of carbon with a small change. From now on, we’ll only switch the heater on when we have a big group in (e.g. Sundays or bigger coffee mornings). For the rest of the time, we’ll just use the kettle (a kettle costs 6p to boil and doesn’t need an engineer or a service).
I’ve put a poster with some information by the water heater unit for those on coffee rotas. Do feel free to continue using the water heater when you need to and it’s safer to do so. But otherwise let’s switch to a kettle.
What other things in our lives do we take for granted, but incrementally add to our carbon emissions and eat our money…?
Rev Dr Mark Laynesmith
Vicar, Earley St Nicolas Church