Attention all church facility managers: you’ve got a big responsibility. God has entrusted His creation and everything in it to us. It’s not only a tremendous duty but an excellent opportunity. Good facility stewardship means looking at all costs and striving to pour as much as you can into ministry initiatives.
Church Facility Stewardship & Energy Savings
One way you can reduce your total cost of ownership is by leveraging energy conservation opportunities. In addition to the extended life of the HVAC unit, there are significant energy savings. Please note that you can generally obtain a 20% longer useful life by implementing regular maintenance. Therefore, you have reduced your ownership cost. If your facility is entirely powered by electricity, your HVAC usage as a percentage of the total utility cost equates to about 50-75%.
According to the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air Conditioning Engineers, if you do not provide regular cleaning of your condensing coils (the coils on the exterior units), you will increase your energy consumption by as much as 30%. Additionally, you will consume more energy if you neglect to routinely clean the evaporator coil (the coil on the inside units). That is a ton of power – literally.
Energy Savings in Practice
To help you better understand, let’s look at a real-life scenario. Let’s say you have a 20,000-square-foot facility. On average, your annual electric bills are about $1.50 per square foot. Therefore your bills total to about $30,000.
If we take 60% of the above amount as the HVAC load, we could allocate about $18,000 for the HVAC consumption. However, if we look at the added cost for poor maintenance practice and increase the operational cost by 30%, as indicated above, the added energy cost would be $5,400 per year. Not to mention the strong likelihood that the drain on the system will reduce the unit’s useful life and increase repairs or service calls.
If the filters were changed and the coils cleaned twice a year (the minimum), you would have costs of about $1,000 a year. Therefore, you would have netted a savings of about $4,400 per year. This amount could go directly toward ministry initiatives — the core purpose for the church’s existence.
Church Facility Stewardship & Energy Savings Go Hand-In-Hand
Here’s the deal: energy savings and good church facility stewardship go hand-in-hand. To steward all God has entrusted us with, we must look at the often neglected costs, like energy consumption. To learn more about how you can become a good church facility steward, we highly recommend digging deeper into Tim Cool’s guide on how to be intentional with stewarding your church facility.
For more support, our team is always here to help. Give us a shout to either set up a demo or talk through some of the pain points your church facility may be facing. Another way to increase your energy savings is to integrate your HVAC systems with your eSPACE Event Scheduler. Our clients to utilize this integration are seeing upwards of 30% in energy savings. Click HERE to learn more.
