HVAC System for the Offices

The trustees and parish council to seek your support for a new building project at St. Faith’s—the installation of a ductless mini split heating/cooling system in the church offices. While there are several benefits we hope to gain from such a system, which are described below, the most pressing need is to address cooling needs during hot spells in the summer.

When we are in a heat event, as soon as the sun hits the office (starting around noon) the temperatures quickly exceed the acceptable range of 23-26°C as described by the Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety. This a problem for the health of staff, whom we end up sending home early each day during heat events. It is also damaging to office equipment, some of which starts to malfunction in the afternoon heat—in the summer months we must schedule printing the bulletins for the early morning because the copier stops working properly.

You may be asking yourself why this is suddenly an issue now, after all the church office has managed for 75 years without a cooling system in place! There are two simple answers. First, we have more staff onsite for more hours than in previous years. Looking back, in the past our staff either worked offsite more often, or tended to only be onsite for partial days—generally in the morning—especially during the summer. Given the heat in the office on summer afternoons, this pattern of staffing is not a surprise. Second, Vancouver is getting warmer. Major heat events used to be rare but are now increasingly common and prolonged.

Benefits

Cooling during heat events is not the only benefit we anticipate from this system:

• Heating in the Winter: Ductless mini split systems work as both cooling and heating systems. We will be able to heat the offices exclusively with this system in the winter months.
• Saving Money: Because of the way our natural gas furnace system is designed, heating the church offices means heating the entire sanctuary space during the week, which costs money. This new mini split system would allow us to heat only the offices, while keeping the sanctuary heat system at a lower temperature.
• Reducing our Carbon Footprint: As a part of our work to address climate change, this new mini split system, which runs on electricity, will lower our church’s carbon footprint. By only heating the offices and not the whole sanctuary, we will reduce the amount of natural gas our furnace consumes, which is what heats the rest of the building.

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