Wrightstown Friends Meeting Goes Green
In early 2023 members of Wrightstown Meeting came under the weight of finding a way to put our Quaker testimony of stewardship for the earth into action. The result was the formation of our “Green Team,” a small group of Friends who were tasked with researching how to best accomplish our goal of reducing the carbon footprint of both our meetinghouse and social hall/nursey school buildings.
It became clear that the first steps to reduce our use of fossil fuels would be to replace our oil burning furnaces with energy efficient geothermal heat pumps and install accompanying solar panels to create our own clean electricity that could also help power the pumps. Friends Jeff Cogshall and Gary Whitman took on the responsibility of scheduling meetings with contractors and getting estimates for the work that needed to be done to accomplish this.
The first roadblock we encountered was the meetinghouse itself. Our building, which was constructed in the 1700s, has a slate roof, and we quickly realized that solar panels cannot be installed on slate. Besides, we were reluctant to change the look of our historic building. But it turned out that our our social hall/nursery school building was an ideal location for installing solar panels.
We decided that two geothermal heat pumps would be sufficient to replace the old fuel-burning boiler. While geothermal sourced heat pumps have more upfront costs, they ultimately are more energy efficient and therefore less expensive to run than air sourced heat pumps. Luckily, both the solar panels and the geothermal heat pumps qualified for the maximum 30% subsidy available from the government. And since heat pumps provide both heating and cooling, we also gained a lovely climate-controlled social hall and nursery school that will be much more comfortable during the hot summer months.
A birds-eye view of the new solar panels
So, what are our next steps? The Meeting is looking to upgrade our landscaping equipment with more environmentally friendly options. We would like to replace our polluting two-cycle leaf blowers with battery powered units and exchange our current gas-powered mower for an electric zero-turn model. We also hope to use both pieces of equipment far less by allowing more areas on the property to return to natural meadow. Finally, we would like to replace the fuel burning furnace in the meetinghouse with an energy efficient heat pump.
We know that these are very ambitious goals, but our meeting community has been greatly encouraged by the progress we made this year. It’s these small but meaningful steps that we can take that are helping us to live into our testimony of Stewardship of the Environment.