Problems with a heating system tend to get some people very hot and bothered, while others are simply left cold. Sometimes knowing where to start or what options are available can be a tricky business. The sheer volume of industry jargon involved in most heating applications is enough to get anyone’s temperature rising.

So, in an attempt to provide clarity and insight, the DAC has issued a guidance note tackling the hot topic of church heating. It can be found here. In it you will find a wealth of information about the different types of heating system, and the various processes involved in their installation. Pretty cool, right?

If you’re struggling with your church heating, there are a few basic points you should consider before throwing the boiler on the scrap heap.

Maintenance is good for your heating bills

A well maintained church has better thermal properties than one which is poorly maintained. Think of your church as an overcoat protecting you from the weather: if it’s completely saturated with water, and full of holes, you’ll feel cold wearing it. If the overcoat is dry and in good repair you’ll stay snug. So, make sure that the walls of your church are kept dry by clearing your gutters, and that the slipped slates or loose panes of glass are fixed to stop unnecessary air and heat exchange.

Behavioural Benefits

The way you use the building can impact on the effectiveness of your heating. How many entrances are in use on a Sunday morning? Will your welcome team stand with the door open? If you’re having trouble with the heating, you may want to reduce the number of doors in use or propped open regularly. If you have events during the week, is it possible to ensure they follow each other or occur on consecutive days? This will avoid the need to reheat the building from cold each time. All this may seem obvious, but when viewed as a whole it’s easy for these little matters to become big drains on your church heating.

Costume Drama

Historic churches have received complaints about drafts and poor heating for centuries. However, our ancestors were better at dealing with the cold when it came to wearing better clothes. Wrapping up warm when staying inside may seem unusual in modern London, but that doesn’t mean your heating system is ineffective if your parish church fails to resemble Westfield shopping centre. Good clothing including thick-soled shoes and a hat reduces personal heat loss significantly.

The news from Ecclesiastical is good. Theft of metal from church roofs in the UK fell to its lowest level last year since 2006.

Statistics released this month by specialist church and  heritage insurer Ecclesiastical reveal that there were over 930 insurance claims from Anglican churches in 2012 for theft of lead and other metals from the exterior of the building compared with over 2,600 claims in 2011, the worst year on record.

The cost of claims fell from nearly £4.5 million in 2011 to £1.8 million in 2012.

Reasons behind the steep drop in metal theft from churches are a matter of speculation but the decline follows concerted efforts to deter criminals by the Government and a range of affected industries such as the utilities and transport sectors. Ecclesiastical also launched its own national campaign, Hands Off Our Church Roofs, in February 2012 to fit sophisticated electronic alarm systems on the roofs of Anglican churches in 42 mainland English dioceses and a number of alarms in Scotland and Wales.  Ecclesiastical launched the campaign by providing £500,000 to install alarms free of charge on some of the UK’s churches most badly affected by metal theft.

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Today marks the start of National Maintenance Week. A glorious, seven-day extravaganza of sweeping, cleaning, unclogging, uprooting, fixing up, sanding down, and generally getting to grips with all those buildings tasks we’ve been waiting to do.

2012 marks the eleventh annual maintenance week. Each year receives a particular emphasis from its coordinators, the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings. This year the SPAB puts the spotlight on energy efficiency:

“A badly maintained building cannot be an energy efficient building. That’s the key message of the SPAB’s 2012 National Maintenance Week Campaign.”

Energy Efficiency and Good Maintenance

These two topics are often seen to as separate subjects, but National Maintenance Week serves as a useful reminder that they have much in common.

A poorly maintained building will always be inefficient. Drafts through doors and windows, or dampness from poor drainage all contribute to a colder environment and the need for more output from your heating system.

Aiming to achieving energy efficiency through good maintenance is a brilliant way to reduce your costs. Bills for repairs and for energy use will both decrease. For a good introduction to this thrifty philosophy follow this link to the SPAB’s Top Ten Easy Energy Tips.

All this wet weather can be draining. The clever folks behind the Gutter Maintenance Programme intend to keep it that way. After six years and countless miles of gutters purged of fallen leaves, sludge and detritus, the solution to blocked rainwater goods is clear.

Every year the scheme clears around 25.5 miles of gutters. That’s a gutter marathon! If you joined those together you could run a length of gutters along the Thames all the way from Kew Bridge to Dagenham Dock.

Can’t I just leaf them alone?

The truth is: gutters don’t clear themselves. Leafy London looks lovely at this time of year, but all that fallen foliage has to end up somewhere. A great deal of it ends up in gutters, along with moss, pigeon muck, litter, and a strangely high number of footballs.

Our buildings have gutters for a reason; they deliver water away from the building. Once they are blocked, water will pool and overflow. Suddenly they are carrying out the very opposite of their intended purpose and actually introducing water to the building. Frustratingly, we don’t always spot this until the damage is quite severe. One parish I have worked with ignored their gutters for five years and faced a completely unexpected bill of £250,000. Their blocked gutters had pooled water, causing their roof timbers to sit soaking in puddles and ultimately the rafters rotted to nothing.

In fact, the single biggest cost to the Church of England is water ingress to its historic buildings. Keeping rainwater disposal systems clear is completely essential if big repair bills are to be avoided. The Gutter Maintenance Programme simply finds a way to make cheaper.

Sign me up!

Interest in the programme is wider than just the Diocese of London, and other dioceses and denominations in the London area are being invited to join the scheme for the first time. Because the affordability of the scheme is founded on an economy of scale, increasing membership numbers is a great way to secure its future.

National Gutters Day is just around the corner on 30^th November! Has it been a year already? If you’re not already a member of the Gutter Maintenance Programme, why not drop us a line and find out more about it. There’s no big commitment involved, just a simple scheme to clear your gutters and save you money down the line.

To join fill out this form: Gutterform or for more information contact Mattanah Sackey by calling 020 7932 1250 or emailing gutters (Email: gutters [at] london.anglican.org).

You join us for the final instalment of the Care of Churches Team (plus Olympic mobiliser) trip to France where they built a brand new medieval castle in the middle of a Burgundian forest. Obviously.

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Mixing mortar in the thirteenth century

If you have ever had the pleasure of discussing pointing or stonework with your church’s quinquennial inspector it is likely you have come across the term ‘lime mortar’. This lovely stuff is vital to old buildings, and last week I had the exquisite torture or making literally cartloads of it.

Here comes the science bit:

‘Pure lime’ or ‘lime putty’ forms the basis of most traditional mortars. It is created by taking limestone (Calcium Carbonate) and firing it to burn off CO2, leaving Calcium Oxide (‘Quick Lime’). Add a bit of water and you have a lime putty (Ca(OH)2 – Calcium Hydroxide). To this add sand and you have lime mortar. Excellent! As the water evaporates from the mortar a further chemical change takes place leaving you once again with Calcium Carbonate. Magic. Your mortar now has exactly the same chemical composition as limestone, and it’s even managed to absorb some Carbon from the air.

Isn’t this just old-fashioned cement?

A very good question! Cement is an excellent material, but is not always suited to an historic building. For starters it is often considerably harder than the material it holds together. One consequence of this is that water will remain in softer brick or stone, causing decay and erosion. It’s not uncommon to see areas of brickwork where the cement mortar is in perfect condition, while the bricks are slowly disappearing from the wall. In a wall constructed of lime mortar, the lime acts sacrificially allowing the building blocks to remain in good condition whilst the mortar erodes instead.

Another interesting property of lime as a building material is its apparent tendency to bend. Under tension a wall constructed using cement may crack (leaving large holes for more water to enter, and the problem worsens). Lime is often said to be ‘flexible’ as this tendency to crack is not seen. In reality a lime wall does crack – thousands of micro-cracks form throughout the mortar. When the building is next exposed to rain the water will enter these cracks, as it evaporates the cracks ‘heal’ in their new position without any cavity. The wall may have moved – sometimes bulging or leaning outwards – but it remains a solid wall without large troublesome cracks.

Lime mortar sometimes seems to require more maintenance than cement. Its sacrificial nature means that while your stonework remains in good condition, your pointing may need to be renewed once a century or so. And if anyone tries to tell you it’s not as good as cement, you may want to remind them that Westminster Abbey and St Paul’s Cathedral are both held together by lime mortar.

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If you happened to be travelling through central France in August this year (in the gap between the Olympics and Paralympics) you may have stumbled across an unusual sight. The Care of Churches Team, and the much-in-need-of-a-change-of-scene Olympic mobiliser, could be found dressed in home-made medieval outfits helping to build a castle in a Burgundian forest. It’s just another day at the office really.

Le Back Story

Back in 1997 the project to build a brand new castle in the forest at Guedelon in central France began. Using only thirteenth century tools and techniques (with the odd exception on health and safety grounds – thank goodness), the aims of the initiative were to learn more about how these buildings were constructed so that we can care for those which remain today, to boost the local economy, and to teach history in an innovative and entertaining fashion. It succeeds brilliantly on all points.

Every year hundreds of bizarre enthusiasts (and some skilled individuals) volunteer to assist the permanent team in smashing stones, mixing mortar, working wood, splitting shingles, weaving wicker, and generally labouring their socks off to get this castle built. And so, we thought, what better way to spend your annual leave than by carrying rocks on a French building site in forty degree heat, dressed in a medieval tunic you put together with your manager?
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What’s the first thing that you notice on walking into an historic church? Well there are plenty of things that might claim your attention but I suspect that pews are hardly at the top of most people’s list. For most of us, I imagine, they are something fairly utilitarian – there to sit on and that’s about it. They have few merits, least of all any that could be classed as ergonomic. For quite a few vicars today the things are the bane of their life: it’s difficult enough trying to grow a congregation without trying to persuade newcomers to put up with the backside-numbing experience that worship in a pewed church all too often entails.

Worse, they are the stumbling block that all too often puts paid to worthy initiatives to make a church interior flexible and thus able to be used outside service times. Rare these days are the PCC members who haven’t at some point wailed, “There are so many things we could do with the building if only it weren’t for the pews”. Trying to move them around can send vergers straight to the local A&E, assuming the things are even capable of being detached from the floor.

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In recent years the experience of handling VAT when carrying out works to a church building has been similar to swimming in the Thames: hard work, subject to constant changes in direction, and ultimately leaving a bad taste in your mouth.

Since the Chancellor’s budget of 2011 listed church buildings have been required to pay VAT on all repairs, making projects considerably more expensive. However, in response to successful campaigning from the Church Buildings Council and other bodies concerned for the country’s heritage, the government provided a pot of money called the Listed Places of Worship Grant Scheme. This pot could be applied to for grants which would cover a church’s VAT expenditure on repairs. Good news. [Read more...]

Thank you to everyone who took the trouble to sign the epetition against the imposition of VAT on alterations to listed church buildings.

Following some very hard lobbying work, not least from Bishop Richard himself, the government has agreed a compromise solution whereby the existing Listed Places of Worship Grant Scheme will be extended by £30 million p.a. for the life of this parliament.

The National Church Buildings Council is confident that this figure will be sufficient to cover the whole of the eligible VAT liability for both repairs and alterations to listed church buildings. The new system will require the VAT to be paid and then claimed back again.

Other charitable custodians of historic buildings have not yet been so fortunate and their struggle continues.

Please keep an eye on the Listed Places of Worship Grant Scheme website for further updates.